🚨 AI can now clone a voice from just a few seconds of audio — which means "I recognized their voice" isn't proof of anything anymore.

I'm Jocelyn King, and this week on the Smarter Online Safety Show I sit down with retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Terri Borras — 40 years in military intelligence, former Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon, and now one of the sharpest voices working in cognitive security and deepfake detection. What she told me changed how I think about every "safe" system I use.

We get into:

Her rule for all of it, in three words: Pause. Verify. Act.

👤 CONNECT WITH RETD. BRIGADIER GENERAL TERRI BORRAS

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I'm Jocelyn King, the Queen of Online Safety and a Top 10 Woman in Cybersecurity — here every week to help you and your family stay a step ahead of AI-powered scams. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

📚 Referenced in this episode: AI voice-cloning capability, via Fox News : https://www.foxnews.com/tech/ai-voice-scams-clone-familys-voice 

Is pasting your work documents into ChatGPT putting your job on the line? 😳 In this episode of the Smarter Online Safety Show, I sit down with AI & data privacy attorney Charlyn Ho — a U.S. Navy veteran, former Big Law partner, and founder/CEO of Rikka Law Group — to break down exactly what happens to your data the second you hit "send" on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any AI chatbot.

Charlyn has spent her career on the other side of the table from the world's biggest tech companies — she's represented Microsoft and Meta and read the fine print the rest of us just scroll past. In this conversation, we get into why free AI tools can quietly turn your confidential company data into a fireable (or sueable) offense, what "if you're not paying, you're the product" really means for your privacy, whether AI chatbots and companion apps are actually safe — or even legal — for kids and teens, and what small business owners need to know to use AI without a legal department.

Whether you're an employee using AI at work, a parent worried about AI chatbots and your kids, or a small business owner building your first AI policy — this is your plain-English guide to using AI safely in 2026.

💡 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE:

🔗 RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Connect with Charlyn Ho & Rikka Law Group:

Legal resources referenced in this episode:

I just spent 9 days at Black Hat, DEFCON, and BSides Las Vegas — the week the industry calls "Hacker Summer Camp" — and I watched a stranger get deepfaked in real time. Here's my full debrief.

I'm Jocelyn King, the Queen of Online Safety, and every August I go straight into the middle of it: 115°F heat, four conferences, and the smartest hackers and defenders on the planet showing exactly what they've broken. This year the takeaway was impossible to miss — AI isn't just a tool we use anymore. It's an active participant in both the attack and the defense. In this special edition of the Smarter Online Safety Show, I'm breaking down the five biggest things I took away from Hacker Summer Camp 2026, and turning every one of them into something you can actually do to protect yourself, your family, and your business.

IN THIS EPISODE:

📘 Want the full playbook? My book, Digital Self-Defense in an AI World: How to Protect Yourself Online, walks you through the exact steps to protect yourself, your family, and your accounts:

An AI agent escaped a testing lab and hacked into a real company's systems — with zero human direction. That's not science fiction, it happened in July 2026, and when I brought it up to my guest, a cybersecurity veteran with FOUR DECADES protecting Fortune 5 companies, healthcare systems, and government agencies, even he admitted: "That scared me."

In this episode of Smarter Online Safety, I sit down with Rick Cobello — former Chief Information Security Officer, cybersecurity advisor, and now author of the cybercrime thriller *The Shady Side of Saratoga* — to talk about what's really happening behind the headlines. We get into:

✅ Why an autonomous AI agent breaking containment should worry every business owner

Rick spent his career on the inside — General Electric, New York State cybersecurity leadership, healthcare systems holding millions of patient records — and he's seen the breaches nobody ever hears about. Now he's telling those stories through fiction, and in this conversation, he tells them to you straight.

If you've ever wondered whether your data is really safe, or what a security expert actually does to protect himself online, this episode is your wake-up call.

📚 Grab Rick's book, The Shady Side of Saratoga, linked below.

🔗 Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode

- 📖 The Shady Side of Saratoga (Rick's novel, paperback) — https://www.amazon.com/Shady-Side-Saratoga-Richard-Cobello/dp/B0H3W7MMZV 

Is your feed even real anymore? In Part 2, I sit back down with security expert and RooVerse founder Ross Thorpe to talk about the AI-generated content quietly taking over social media — AI slop, bots, deepfakes, and how to actually spot it before it fools you.

We get into the stats that stopped me in my tracks: how much of what you're scrolling past every day isn't made by a real person, what just a few minutes of chatbot use does to your brain, and the bots making up a huge share of "engagement" on the platforms you use daily. Ross also walks me through RooVerse, the human-only social app he built specifically to keep AI out, and shares the habits he actually uses to stay sane — and real — online.

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Haven't seen Part 1 yet? That's where we cover physical and campus safety — go listen to that first.

In this episode:

Ross Thorpe is the founder of RooVerse and works with NGS Security, the UK's leading security provider for universities and student accommodation.

Sources & studies mentioned in this episode:

Sending your kid off to college this year? Before move-in day, watch this. I sit down with campus security expert Ross Thorpe to talk about the college safety tips every parent and student actually needs — not the generic checklist, the real stuff.

Ross has spent his career protecting university students on the ground, and in this episode we get into why "no" is a complete sentence, how to stay safe at parties and concerts without living in fear, the oversharing habit that turns your online presence into a physical safety risk, and what to actually do when someone won't take a boundary seriously. We also break down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and why you can't expect anyone — student or otherwise — to thrive if they don't feel safe first.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Part 2 goes even deeper into the online side of safety — subscribe so you don't miss it.

In this episode:

Ross Thorpe works with NGS Security, the UK's leading security provider for universities and student accommodation.

If this helped you — or made you think differently about how you or your kid shows up online and in the real world — share it with someone heading off to campus this year. Subscribe for Part 2.

Stay safe out there.

Cybersecurity expert Scott Schober has been hacked more times than he can count — so I sat him down to break exactly how AI voice cloning scams and SIM swap attacks are draining bank accounts right now, and the free, simple steps that actually stop them.

In this episode of The Smarter Online Safety Show, I talk with Scott Schober — author of Hacked Again, Cybersecurity Is Everybody's Business, and Senior Cyber, and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems — about the scams targeting your family, your phone number, and your bank account right now.

We cover:

Scott has personally been hacked — his credit cards, debit card, business account, social media, and website were all compromised — and turned that experience into a mission to help the rest of us stay safe online. If you or someone you love uses a smartphone, online banking, or social media, this conversation could save you from becoming the next victim.

🔗 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE / GUEST RESOURCES

Your Venmo, Strava & Netflix accounts may be public right now — I sat down with Kraken's Global CISO to find out how to fix it.

In this episode of the Smarter Online Safety Show, I'm joined by Dr. Alex Shulman-Peleg — Global CISO at Kraken, PhD in Computer Science, holder of 14 patents in cloud security and access control, and author of 30+ cybersecurity publications cited over 4,000 times. We dig into online privacy, social media privacy settings, identity theft, deepfakes, and digital self-defense in the age of AI.

In this episode, you'll learn:

👤 About Alex Shulman-Peleg:

If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it — because once your privacy is gone, it's a lot harder to get back.

AI scams are getting smarter every day — and even cybersecurity experts almost get fooled by them. In this episode I sit down with ethical hacker and social engineering expert Lee Anderson to break down exactly how phishing, AI-powered scams, and online predators are targeting you, your kids, and your smart home devices right now — and what actually stops them.

Lee has spent 16+ years inside offensive security and phishing programs, and he doesn't sugarcoat it: he shares the moment his own son nearly fell for a phishing scam, and why he says "even someone who's in it isn't immune."

🔐 What you'll learn in this episode:

👤 About my guest:

🔗 Innocent Lives Foundation: https://www.innocentlivesfoundation.org 

How do you find a hidden camera in your hotel room before it's too late? In Part 2, executive protection expert Frank Roberson and I go even deeper.

Missed Part 1? Start there first — this picks up right where we left off. I open up about my own cybercrime attack, where hackers impersonated a family member to disable my alarms and cameras, unlock my deadbolts, and plant surveillance inside my own home without leaving a trace.

From there, Frank and I cover how your smart devices can become an attack surface used against you, and the wire fraud scheme that cost one family office over $400,000 after criminals studied their billing patterns for three months before striking. We also break down hidden camera detection while traveling, including a pre-check-in bug sweep that found recording devices planted in a Super Bowl host hotel room, and a real hidden camera found behind a USB plug in a restaurant bathroom.

Frank also walks through the hotel security assessment he did in London (with Johnny Depp staying down the hall), the pickpocket scams tourists run into in Europe, the "rule of three" test his team uses to spot if someone is following you, and why situational awareness at a gas station could save your life.

Frank has spent over two decades in executive protection, counterintelligence, and high-threat response as CEO of the Black Rhino Group. He breaks down the pre-event indicators, gut-instinct signals, and simple checklist habits that separate being prepared from being paranoid.

If you travel, work remotely, or just want more control over your own privacy and safety, this episode is for you.

🔗 Learn more about Frank & Black Rhino Group: https://blackrhinogrp.com/