Tech Updates

By Andres SarmientoNews Technology Tech News

Tech Updates episodes

July 13 Passkeys Explained — How They Kill Phishing, Vishing & Password Theft
Every breach in our last episode died the same way it started — with a password. So this week: the fix that's finally winning. On World Passkey Day this May, the FIDO Alliance counted 5 billion passkeys in use. The password isn't dead yet — but we finally have the thing that kills it.
What you'll hear:
• How a passkey works — public/private keypair, private key never leaves your device, origin-bound signatures
• Why passkeys defeat the 2026 attack playbook — phishing, credential stuffing, MFA fatigue, and the help-desk reset scam (CISA advisory AA23-320A names FIDO as the fix)
• The numbers — 98% vs 32% sign-in success, ~1M passkeys/day, Gartner's 2027 call
• Synced vs device-bound passkeys — and why device-bound = NIST AAL3
• The honest half — account recovery, device loss, and the real 2026 frontier
• Network+/Security+ relevance — phishing-resistant MFA, by the book
Sources: FIDO Alliance (World Passkey Day 2026) · Microsoft Security · CISA/FBI advisory AA23-320A · NIST SP 800-63B.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#passkeys #cybersecurity #passwordless #FIDO2 #SecurityPlus #TechUpdates
6 min
June 24 The Worst Breaches of 2026 (So Far) — And the 5 Mistakes Behind Them
Six months into 2026 and the breach scoreboard is brutal: 22 million Aflac records, 30 million students locked out during finals, the FBI's own surveillance system breached, four banks knocked offline in an afternoon. But almost none of it was clever. No genius zero-days. Just a phone call, a stolen token, and an open door.
This is the 2026 Breach Hall of Shame — we name names, correct the hype, and show you the five failures connecting all of it.
What you'll hear:
• The vishing wave — Aflac, Carnival, Canvas, Charter — how Scattered Spider & ShinyHunters just called the help desk
• Two corrections: OnlyFans was NOT breached (recycled old data), and Charter was ~4.9M, not the 40M claimed
• The nation-state lane — Salt Typhoon in the FBI's network, Russia-linked sabotage in Europe, Volt Typhoon pre-positioned in US utilities
• The supply-chain wave — poisoned dev tools stealing API keys, OAuth grants, and CI/CD secrets
• The common thread: social engineering, missing MFA, non-human identities, exposed services, flat networks
• A 4-move Monday playbook to defend the new perimeter
Sources: TechCrunch "worst hacks of 2026 so far" (June 7) · CISA/NSA/FBI assessments · public breach disclosures. Nation-state attributions are linked/suspected, not court-proven.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#cybersecurity #databreach #infosec #SecurityPlus #identitysecurity #TechUpdates
6 min
June 17 Post-Quantum Cryptography Explained — Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (2026)
Right now, somewhere, an adversary is copying your encrypted VPN traffic. They can't read it today. They're saving it — for the day a quantum computer can crack it open. It's called "harvest now, decrypt later," and in 2026 it stopped being a thought experiment.
This episode breaks down the post-quantum migration for people who actually run networks.
What you'll hear:
• The three NIST post-quantum standards (ML-KEM for key exchange, ML-DSA + SLH-DSA for signatures), finalized August 2024
• What "harvest now, decrypt later" means and why 5+ year data is already exposed
• The expert-odds jump — 34% to 49% in one year — that a code-breaking quantum computer arrives within a decade
• Cisco's real ship dates: Quantum Ready Assessments (July), IOS XE PQC for SD-WAN (August), default quantum-safe secure boot, majority of portfolio by December
• Where it maps to Network+: IPsec VPNs, TLS handshakes, PKI, certificates, SD-WAN
• Hype vs. the honest take — why migrating is worth it even if "Q-Day" never comes
• A 4-step Monday playbook
Sources: NIST FIPS 203/204/205 · Global Risk Institute Quantum Threat Timeline Report 2025 · Google quantum research (March 2026) · Cisco Live 2026 · NSA CNSA 2.0 / White House NSM-10 / EU PQC roadmap.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#postquantum #cryptography #cybersecurity #networking #NetworkPlus #TechUpdates
6 min
June 10 Cisco Live 2026 Explained — Cloud Control, AgenticOps, Post-Mythos Security
450%. That's how much more network traffic an AI agent generates than a human doing the same task. Cisco measured it, put it on the big screen at Cisco Live 2026, and then rebuilt its entire company around it.
Last week in Las Vegas, Cisco made its biggest platform bet in two decades: every product — Catalyst, Meraki, Nexus, security, collaboration, Splunk — managed from one place, Cisco Cloud Control. This episode tears down what's real, what's vapor, and what it means for your network.
What you'll hear:
• Cloud Control — what it actually unifies, the AI runbooks, autonomous remediation, and the Codex natural-language agent builder
• Cisco IQ, the sleeper hit — 2,036 customers onboarded vs. 800 expected, 88% support-case routing, the end of the 35-minute data-collection phase
• The math: 450% more traffic per agent · AI traffic tripling in 3 years · tokenomics ($200/week per AI employee → $400M/year at 40,000)
• Post-Mythos security — Live Protect rebootless mitigation, Nexus 9K smart switches with L4 firewalls in the data plane, the agentic SOC discarding 92% of alerts
• Vendor English, translated — AgenticOps, "trillions of agents," and which claims are shipping vs. decorative
• The Monday playbook — four things to actually do this week
The products are real. The math is scary. The dashboard promise? Ask us again at Cisco Live 2027.
Sources: Cisco Live 2026 keynotes (Robbins, Patel, Centoni — Las Vegas, June 2026) · Cisco Newsroom keynote TL;DR · SiliconANGLE five takeaways · Computer Weekly post-Mythos analysis · Anthropic Claude Mythos / Project Glasswing disclosures (April 2026).
— Andrés Sarmiento
#CiscoLive #networking #AgenticOps #CloudControl #cybersecurity #TechUpdates
8 min
May 21 Non-Human Identity Security Explained — The 45:1 NHI Crisis in 2026
45 to 1. In the average enterprise, for every human user there are 45 machine identities. Every API key. Every service account. Every agent token. Every secret in every config file. Your IAM platform probably tracks about 2% of them. That's where the breaches are coming from now — Snowflake, GitHub PATs, Azure IMDS. This episode unpacks the NHI crisis, the vendor landscape, and the three control patterns that actually work this quarter.
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📚 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
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✅ What counts as a non-human identity (it's more than service accounts)
✅ The 45:1 ratio — and why it's 200:1 in agentic shops
✅ Why "service account" is doing too much work (meet Dave)
✅ How Snowflake, GitHub PAT theft, and Azure IMDS all trace to NHIs
✅ Why your PAM solution doesn't cover any of this
✅ The NHI vendor landscape — Astrix, Oasis, Clutch, Teleport, Natoma
✅ The 3 control patterns that work (inventory, rotate, scope down)
✅ Why agents make this 10× worse by 2027
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⏱ CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro — the 45:1 ratio
0:49 What is an NHI? (it's not just service accounts)
2:05 Dave is your problem
2:48 The breach file — Snowflake, GitHub PAT, Azure IMDS
4:20 Why PAM doesn't cover this
5:24 The NHI vendor landscape (still a 2-year-old category)
6:30 The 3 control patterns that work
7:46 Agents are NHIs — the 500:1 future
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🎯 THE MEMORABLE LINES
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• "A service account was created by Dave in 2017, has god-mode permissions, no rotation policy, is used by 42 systems nobody audited, and Dave left in 2020."
• "Snowflake did what Snowflake was told to do. The instructions were 'trust this credential.' Guess what didn't have MFA."
• "We are about to go from 45-to-1 to 500-to-1."
• "Stop hardcoding secrets in your Git repos. Every scanner finds them in the first five minutes."
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🛠 THE 3 FREE CONTROL PATTERNS
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• Inventory — you can't secure what you can't see
• Rotate — replace long-lived creds with short-lived alternatives
• Scope down — every NHI has more perms than it needs
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📡 TECH UPDATES · THE PODCAST
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🔗 techupdates.it-learn.io
Previous → EP20 · Typhoon Season, One Year Later
End of the EP17–21 arc. Thanks for listening.
#TechUpdates #NHI #NonHumanIdentity #IAM #Snowflake #GitHub #PAM #Astrix #Oasis #Teleport #IdentitySecurity #CyberSecurity
9 min
May 20 Special · S04: The OT/ICS Defender — Why Volt Typhoon Should Worry You
$140K. When you mess up, the lights go out for real.
Final episode of TechUpdates Special Series. The most consequential security job almost nobody talks about — defending the systems that keep the country running. Power grids. Water utilities. Petrochemical plants. Pipelines.
What you'll hear:
• What OT/ICS defenders actually do — segmentation, SCADA patching, PLC defense, plant-engineer coordination
• Comp reality — why OT pays 40–60% less than cloud security at the same companies, and the "purpose tax"
• The real stakes: Ukraine 2015 grid attack · Triton 2017 (Saudi Arabia) · Oldsmar 2021 · Aliquippa 2023 · Volt Typhoon pre-positioning across U.S. critical infrastructure
• A real day — substations at 6 AM, vendors that still ship Windows 7 SCADA, plant managers explaining why your last predecessor retired in 2015
• The two paths in — plant engineer to security, or IT security to OT — and why CISSP doesn't help but GICSP does
• LinkedIn's "critical infrastructure defender" vs. the actual day (30% travel to plants, 20% talking plant engineers into caring)
When you mess up here, there's a body count. When you do it right, nobody notices the lights stayed on. That's the whole job description. And it matters more every year as adversaries pre-position inside the operational networks of utilities they intend to disrupt on a date of their choosing.
Sources: CISA joint advisory on Volt Typhoon (early 2024) · Ukrainian power grid attack (Dec 2015) · Triton/TRISIS analysis (Saudi Arabia, 2017) · Oldsmar water treatment incident (Florida, 2021) · Aliquippa Municipal Water Authority compromise (Pennsylvania, 2023, attributed to CyberAv3ngers).
That wraps the Special Series. Pick the role that fits you. The field is wide.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#OTSecurity #ICSSecurity #CriticalInfrastructure #VoltTyphoon #cybersecurity #TechUpdates
9 min
May 14 Salt Typhoon Explained — The Chinese Telecom Breach, One Year Later (2026)
In late 2024, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all admitted the same thing: their lawful-intercept systems — the ones they build for law enforcement — had been compromised by a Chinese state actor called Salt Typhoon. Years of dwell time. Wiretap infrastructure for politicians, including a presidential campaign. Sixteen months later, what have we actually fixed? Plus — why Volt Typhoon is the warning shot nobody's responding to, and why OT networks are still flat.
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📚 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
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✅ The Salt / Volt / Flax Typhoon lineup — who they are, what they do
✅ How Salt Typhoon abused CALEA — the FBI's own backdoor
✅ Why Volt Typhoon is military pre-positioning, not espionage
✅ CISA's Feb 2026 lessons-learned report — wins and ugly parts
✅ Why OT networks remain "largely unchanged" from pre-2023 posture
✅ The defensive playbook that ties to Network+ Obj 3.5 (out-of-band mgmt, jump servers)
✅ Why this can't be fixed with a product purchase — it needs policy
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⏱ CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro — 3 telecoms, same breach, same actor
0:49 The Typhoon lineup — Salt, Volt, Flax
2:07 CALEA — the 1994 law that became an attack surface
3:42 CISA's 2026 report — wins and ugly parts
5:06 OT is still flat — the uncomfortable truth
6:51 The defensive playbook — segmentation, zero-trust OT, OOB mgmt
8:45 The real lesson — this is policy, not a product
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🎯 THE MEMORABLE LINES
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• "The FBI's backdoor is also the PRC's backdoor."
• "Predicted — by everyone. Dismissed — by everyone in government. Here we are."
• "You don't get promoted for the attack that doesn't happen."
• "Volt Typhoon is what happens when nobody replaces the kit."
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📡 TECH UPDATES · THE PODCAST
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🔗 techupdates.it-learn.io
Previous → EP19 · AI Is Eating the Grid
Up next → EP21 · Non-Human Identities Are Eating Your Network
#TechUpdates #SaltTyphoon #VoltTyphoon #CALEA #CriticalInfrastructure #OTSecurity #Telecoms #CISA #CyberPolicy #ChinaCybersecurity
8 min
May 13 Special · S03: The AI Security Engineer — The Job Nobody Knew Existed
$450K. The job didn't exist 24 months ago. Every Fortune 500 is hiring.
Episode three of TechUpdates Special Series. AI bug bounties have crossed six figures for a single prompt injection. Frontier labs run model evaluation contests with prize pools in the hundreds of thousands. Two years ago the title "AI Security Engineer" was on zero org charts. Today it's on most of them.
What you'll hear:
• What an AI security engineer actually does — red-team LLMs, secure RAG pipelines, defend training data and weights, write guardrails
• Compensation in price discovery — Fortune 500 $180–250K, big tech $350–500K, frontier labs $700K–$1M+
• The full attack surface: prompt injection, indirect prompt injection, embedding exfiltration, training data poisoning, weight theft, agentic misalignment
• A real day — jailbreak harness, code review of an agent, adversarial eval, MCP review, post-mortem on the attack that almost worked
• The two paths in — security to AI, or AI to security — and why path three doesn't exist yet
• LinkedIn's "responsible AI leader" vs. the actual day (30% red-teaming models, 30% shipping guardrails to production)
This is the most leveraged role in security right now. The hype is loud. The opportunity is real. Don't let one stop you from seeing the other.
Sources: public AI bug bounty programs at Anthropic / OpenAI / Google · OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications · industry comp data at frontier labs.
Next in the series: The OT/ICS Defender.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#AISecurity #LLMSecurity #PromptInjection #infosec #cybersecurity #TechUpdates
9 min
May 07 AI Data Center Power Crisis 2026 — Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Go Nuclear
In 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement to restart Three Mile Island. The nuclear plant. The one from the disaster. In 2025, Amazon bought a small modular reactor. In 2026, Meta locked up 20 years of natural gas at a cost nobody will put on record. We are watching hyperscalers become utilities. This episode covers the numbers, the deals, the grid bottleneck, the green accounting scandal, and the policy fight coming to your electric bill.
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📚 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
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✅ The 2020 → 2030 data center power trajectory (spoiler: vertical)
✅ Training energy costs for GPT-4 class vs GPT-5 class models
✅ The PPA deals board — Microsoft/TMI, Amazon/SMR, Google/geo, Meta/gas
✅ Why the US grid can't take it — 5-to-7-year interconnect queues
✅ The Loudoun County story — one Virginia county, 35% of global cloud
✅ The Scope 3 carbon accounting scandal
✅ Who actually pays for this (hint: your electric bill)
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⏱ CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro — Microsoft reopens Three Mile Island
0:44 The data center power trajectory (2020 → 2030)
2:00 The deals board — who bought what
3:38 The grid breaks — PJM, ERCOT, interconnect queues
5:10 Loudoun County, Virginia — the canary
6:29 The green accounting scandal
7:53 Who pays — your electric bill
9:09 Watch list — the 2027 indicators
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🎯 THE MEMORABLE LINES
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• "The thing about nuclear is, everyone's pro-nuclear until it shows up next to their data."
• "You cannot offset training a frontier model with forest credits. The carbon is burning. The trees are optional."
• "By 2030, data centers will consume the electricity of an always-on Japan that does nothing but run AI."
• "Most creative accounting since WeWork."
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📡 TECH UPDATES · THE PODCAST
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🔗 techupdates.it-learn.io
Previous → EP18 · The Supply Chain Attack Nobody's Talking About
Up next → EP20 · Typhoon Season, One Year Later
#TechUpdates #AIPower #DataCenters #ThreeMileIsland #SMR #Hyperscalers #GridInfrastructure #Microsoft #AWS #Meta #Google #Sustainability
9 min
May 06 Special · S02: The Detection Engineer — How $240K Roles Replaced the SOC
$240K. No degree required. The SOC analyst is dead.
Episode two of TechUpdates Special Series. The SOC industry quietly restructured itself in the last 18 months — tier-one analyst headcount shrinking, SIEM vendors pivoting their pitch — and one role pulled away with software-engineer-grade compensation. The Detection Engineer.
What you'll hear:
• What detection engineers actually do (write detections, tune false positives, hunt, partner with the red team)
• The pay reality — tier-1 SOC $80K vs. principal detection engineer $350K+ at top tech
• Detection-as-code: why "80 alert categories become 800 detections" with the same headcount
• A real day — standup, tuning, hunt, purple team, coffee. No on-call rotation at well-run shops.
• The 6-year path in (vs. the 15-year CISO ladder) — and why zero certifications matter for this role
• LinkedIn's "cyber sherlock" branding vs. the YAML-wrangling reality
If you're a SOC analyst right now, this episode is your map. The role that's replacing yours pays more, ships actual code, and treats security as a software-engineering discipline — not a queue you acknowledge.
Sources: public Splunk and Elastic detection-as-code case studies · industry compensation surveys at Fortune 500 / FAANG / streaming companies.
Next in the series: The AI Security Engineer.
— Andrés Sarmiento
#cybersecurity #DetectionEngineering #ThreatHunting #SOC #SIEM #TechUpdates
8 min

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