What happens when a ransomware attack takes less effort than ordering takeout? In this live news episode of The Audit, Joshua Schmidt, Eric Brown, and Nick Mellem sit down with Tabitha Senty of IT Audit Labs to break down the headlines shaping cybersecurity right now. The crew covers how AI is lowering the barrier to entry for ransomware attacks, why identity and access still sit at the center of every breach, and how threat actors are chaining together low and medium severity vulnerabilities to gain a foothold nobody saw coming. 

From there, the conversation moves into social engineering and the human side of security, including DEF CON's social engineering contest and lessons on training people without fear or punishment. The crew also digs into a CISA warning on how fast AI is accelerating cyber risk, a fresh executive push on post-quantum cryptography, and closes out with a head-scratching pivot from Midjourney into full-body health scanners at spas, and everything that could go wrong with it. 

In this episode: 

• Why AI is lowering the cost of ransomware attacks — Identity and access are still the real entry point, and AI just makes the attack faster once someone's in. 
• How threat actors chain low-severity vulnerabilities into major breaches — Eric explains why patching only highs and criticals is no longer enough to protect an environment. 
• The social engineering tactics still fooling smart people — Pretexting as IT, DEF CON's live social engineering contest, and why fear-based training backfires. 
• A CISA warning that cyber risk is accelerating faster than expected — The timeline for AI-driven offensive capability is no longer years away, it's months. 
• Midjourney's pivot into full-body health scanners at spas — The crew unpacks the security, compliance, and data governance nightmare hiding behind a wellness trend. 

If this conversation sparked something, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Like, share, and subscribe for more of the discussions shaping the future of cybersecurity and IT. 

#AIRansomware #Cybersecurity #SocialEngineering #PostQuantum #IdentitySecurity #ITAudit #CyberNews #DEFCON #ThreatIntelligence #CyberRisk