Technado

Rita Gurevich from SPHERE Technology Solutions joined the team this week to tell the story of why she started the security assessment and remediation services company. She also vented about cloud security in the ‘What Grinds My Gears’ segment. In the news, the guys tackled Western Digital’s new WD Green SSD launch, HPE releasing SSD replacements for 10k RPM HDD server drives, an aggressive sales tactic from Canonical based on Ubuntu VMs on Azure, a novel software supply chain vulnerability that affected 35 major companies, and a Yandex employee selling access to users’ inboxes. Finally, in an adorable WTF segment, they had a laugh at the lawyer who showed up to a Zoom court hearing with a cat filter on his camera.

ITProTV’s newest edutainer, Kathy Chambers, was this week’s guest on Technado to talk about the new audit courses she’s hosting. She also played ‘Virus or Gibberish,’ where the panel tried to guess if something was a real virus or made up based only on its weird name. Trojan Panda Banker, anyone? In the news, the crew looked at Google Cloud’s big revenue losses in 2020, Ubuntu 21.04 switching to Wayland, Raspberry Pi OS adding a Microsoft repository that phones home, and Google booting The Great Suspender Chrome extension for being malware. In listener mail, they dissected the attempted hack of a Florida town’s water treatment plant. Finally, in the WTF segment, the team talked about how scientists have taught spinach to send email. Lookout, Popeye.

The CTO and founder of PathSolutions, Tim Titus, joined the Technado team this week to discuss the trouble with troubleshooting. In a new segment, What Grinds my Gears, he vented about inaccurate reporting and how it can frustrate network technicians. Then, in the news, the guys talked about Microsoft rolling out Application Guard for Office365, a warning from cable ISPs to heavy uploaders, OneDrive’s new 64-bit version, a decade-old Sudo bug that can lead to root-level access in Linux, and the takedown of Emotet malware. Finally, in Who Got Pwned, they looked at a warning about a new social engineering method used against security researchers.

This week, Mark Kedgley from New Net Technologies (NNT) was the guest on Technado to talk about NNT’s Change Tracker for catching suspicious behavior on your network. He also talked about a medical records breach discovered in 2019 that is still exposing PII in this week’s Deja News segment. In other news, the guys discussed Red Hat’s no-cost RHEL option, the uncensorable Web on the Brave browser, Tucows closing its downloads site, DDoSers taking advantage of Microsoft RDP, and SonicWall being hacked by zero-days in its own products.

Nick Tausek from Swimlane joined Technado this week to discuss security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR). He also shared an article he wrote about closing the security workforce gap before giving his thoughts in a Deja News segment about the way Parler data was archived before it went offline. In other news, the team looked at a Thunderbolt 4 monitor from LG that was released at CES, how Windows 10X compares to Chrome OS, Systemd 248 unlocking encrypted volumes via TPM2, a scary Windows 10 bug that can corrupt a hard drive, and BitLocker’s lock-screen bypass flaw.

On this week’s Technado, the guys were joined by Preston Duren of Fortified Health Security. Preston talked about the unique challenges facing healthcare IT, as well as the things about MSSPs that ‘mildly irritate’ him. In the news, the team discussed the origins of AWS, Apple’s privacy labels impacting Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, a Ubiquiti security breach, and an Nvidia warning about graphics driver flaws. Finally, in the WTF segment, they looked at the cybersecurity fallout from the Capitol riot and Parler getting cutoff by AWS.

For the first episode of 2021, Technado welcomed ACI Learning’s Brett Shively who talked about the state of adult learning and the recent merger with ITProTV. Then, the team discussed how some tech businesses are evolving by exiting Silicon Valley and even taking over shopping malls. In the news, they looked at Slack starting the year with an outage, Brexit’s mention of Netscape and Mozilla Mail, Linus Torvalds rant about Intel and ECC, Dell’s new automated webcam shutter, and a team that turned RAM into Wi-Fi cards to exfiltrate data from air-gapped systems. Finally, they put on their tinfoil hats and looked at a schematic for a 5G chip in vaccines that was really just a guitar pedal.

It’s the final episode of 2020, so what better time than to look back at the year that was on Technado with Don Pezet? In this episode, Don, Daniel, and Peter are joined by their old teammate, Justin, as they look back at their highlights of the year. Each of them shares their favorite guest as well as their favorite news article from the past 12 months.

As 2020 nears a close, it’s time for an annual Technado tradition: trying to guess what the heck is going to happen next year. In this episode, Don and Peter are joined by Adam and Wes to predict what the big hardware of 2021 will be, as well as the buzzword of the year. Also in this episode, Peter tries to get back at Don for laughing at his mispronunciations of tech terms throughout the year by quizzing him and the others on the meaning of IT acronyms. And finally, they look at one last news story about aliens during Tin Foil Hat Time.

Rohit Sethi from Security Compass joined the Technado team this week to talk about their platform to drive secure application development. Then, in Deja News, he gave his opinions on the new IoT cybersecurity law. In other news, the crew reported on the google services outage, Cloudflare and apple collaborating on a new internet protocol, CentOS Linux 8 shifting to CentOS Stream, new security measures for Microsoft 365, and the big nation-state attack on Solarwinds that FireEye discovered.