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The last two episodes have been about imposing the doctrine of reasonable care to the production, distribution and use of AI technology.  I also wrote a story about it that posted this week on Cyber Protection Magazine.  I thought I was done with it.  I was wrong.  Lots of stuff has happened including a new bill in Congress dealing directly with liability of AI companies, Meta changing it’s terms of use to state that they were not responsible for any errors produced by their AI, and a lot of emails and texts from people wanting to chime in. One of them is Jonathan Capriola, CEO and founder of AI Blockchain Ventures in Siesta Key, Florida, which is making tools and processes to control and identify AI agents.  He’s kinda all over the map as most inventors I have met are, but he’s making inroads to the government and major corporations with his tech.  It was a fascinating discussion. This episode is sponsored by the Cyber Marketing Conference to be held in Austin beginning November 15

I've been a professsional communicator for more than half a century, as a working journalist, a technical editor, a marketing professional, and back to journalism in the course of my career. No subject area has been more fascinating to me than cybersecurity. But it is also the industry with the worst marketing I've ever seen. Underinvested, misunderstood, misused and lacking serious committment. That's why I'm glad there is the Cyber Marketing Society. there needs to be a place where communicatiions professionals can go to get a reality check on what is possible and to discovere that they aren't crazy, their management doesn't understand what they do. And that makes the fifth annual Cyber Marketing Conference the right place to be in November. We spent this episode discussing what is needed and why the conference came about with Gianna Whitver, founder of the society and welcome them as a new sponsor of this podcast.

In our second part of this series, we talk to companies actively involved in enforcing responsibility from users. First up is Christopher Dion Johnson, CEO of Indie Me. His company creates a registry for celebrity facial property so they can’t be used without permission in deep fakes. He is followed by Austin Worrell, an attorney and founder/CEO of Dialogica, an AI assistant that provides back office support for law firms, doing the gruntwork of paralegals. Both guests take different tracks in licensing, but they both agree that mandating personal responsibility is the most effective path to AI safety.

We took a break before launching into Season 13, which should take us to the end of the year, but we have a doozy to start out with. Earlier this week, my cat decided to throwup on our bed in the early morning and by the time I got it cleaned up I was wide awake. So I started my morning routine of reading the news around 3 am and came across the story of Anthropics IPO documents being leaked early and claiming their technology is a threat to humanity's existence. That came with stories about OpenAI's new model invading hudnreds of other comoanies and more about the giverenment's inability to apply any legislative controls. But there are examples of how we have put controls on dangerous technologies in the past... by licensing their use and manufacture. This podcast is part one of my investigation into how tht can be done. This week, we have Tom Whipp, a financial CISO in. the UK and a long time AI researcher and expert witness, Joseph Steinberg who offer more traditional controls mandating responsibility in building AI tools. Next week we will look into how to control personal use ad entry into the business and AI without hampering free enterprize.

Back in May the coding world reeled to the news that a hacking group, using customized AI agents, had breached Github and stolen 3,800 of its internal repositories by a threat actor group tracked as TeamPCP. The attack was designed to stay under the radar: it ran entirely within normal user permissions and explicitly avoided privilege escalation, so it looked like ordinary developer/AI-assisted activity rather than an attack. The question that comes out of this is, are AI agents fundamentally changing the trust model in collaborative software development? So today I’m talking with Matan Bar-Efrat, the Rein Security, CEO, who’s company is one of the latest in a growing group of companies specializing in enterprise generative AI governance and data security companies. His answer to that question was refeshingly candid.

Flock has been in the news recently in a backlash against municipal surveillance, but this technology has been in use for half a century. Why the problem now? We sat down to talk with a city commissioner from Del Ray Beach, Florida, Tom Markert, who also consults with the FBI on cybersecurity. He's something of a rennaissance man wh, in addition to his corporate and civic work, also writes thrillers and screenplay related to technology and government. He had some insight into the controversy and it is more than surveillance. It's about competence.

A few months ago the tech world went into a tizzy over Anthropic's announcement that it's latest fronter AI incarnation was finding zero-day vulnerabilities. My BS meter started pinging immediately. A zero-day attack requires finding a system vulnerability that no one knows about. It is about as creative a process that a blackhatter can pull off. But AIs can't do anything new or creative. It's output is always based on something a human has already done and shared on the internet. Then I got a pitch from a Swiss academic and tech CEO Ilia Kolochenko titled, 'The illusion of AI Zero-day attacks". this is someone who knows how to get my attention.

It seems the entire cybersecurity industry went on vacation after Blackhat USA last week because every interview I scheduled for this podcast went belly up with cancellations. So at our Monday staff meeting, my EU partner Patrick Boch and I decided to fill the gap this week regarding Anthropic's AI watermark tech. We decided it's not that big a deal. The are a regulatory response (EU), not a choice designed protect publishers from uncopyrightable AI-generated content, and prevent plagiarism. Amazingly enough, one of the stories that popped up this wee was about how Ne Yorker writer Ross Barkum lost a bood deal because most of his content was plagiarized. For us watermarks simplifies content vetting. We can find AI content faster than current AI checkers. The bottom line is human originality has value. As AI floods the internet with "lowest common denominator" content, unique human work will become a premium, potentially reversing the decline in journalistic value. There is a lot more and you can find the transcript on Cyber Protection Magazine next week.

In a world of employment upheaval, job seekers are freely sending out millions of documents containing significant personal information. Whether called CVs or resumes, these documents can be used to impersonate and defraud employers and the job seekers alike. Chris Els, founder of P3 Audit, a data compliance and supply chain risk company, is developing a technology to help get that massive amount of information back under control of those who own it. We talked with him about its importance.

We've been getting an influx of announcements regarding shoulder surfing and technology that protects against it. However, we haven't found a single incident that actually, involved breaking into a device by looking over someone's shoulder. Instead, every report involves stealing someone's phone that hasn't been properly protected by biometrics or MFA. So we put out a call to ask experts about the validity of the problem and Stephanie Schneider from LastPass stepped into the breach. As we thought, you don't really need much to stop it, if it even happens. This podcast is sponsored by Haven, from Mirrortab

Cybersecurity is never more crucial than when it hits home. This past week, my daughter, who runs a small event planning business, was targeted by a phishing exploit known as a Click-Fix, designed to get her to go to a fake website to harvest her Google log-in credentials. She didn't fall for it and we had a lovely discussion about how she recognized it and stopped it in it's tracks. But I thought it would be a good case study for our sponsor, Haven, from Mirrortab, so I got Colin Britton, COO of Mirrortab on the horn and talked about how their free browser extension could have aided the defense. Luckily, my daughter had enough security awareness that precluded the need, but she has it installed now, just in case. And Colin revealed that the Haven service is expanding to a business application.

It has been a while since we talked with Ian Thorton-Trump, CISO and prognosticator at Inversion6, so we were happy when he dropped us a note and reminded us of that lack. Boy, was this one a barn burner. Across the world, pessimism reigns in geopolitics with cybersecurity at the dead center of it. Asymmetric warfare is less about kinetic attacks by terrorists and more about nation-states using the internet to attack and disrupt enemies, and sometimes friends, all over the world. That has resulted in distrust, broken relations, and dysfunctional governments. But from his vantage point in the UK, Ian sees a brighter future ahead and the US will be in the lead, once again. So grab a coffee and a danish and get ready to put a smile on the day.

The idea that humans can be excluded from technology operations has been an aspiration in the AI industry, and that interest is NOT going away. But companies are pushing the idea less and redefining how important humans are in the process, described as humans in the loop, at the helm and in the middle depending on whom you are talking to, A lot of the aspirational efforts have been in automating security operations centers (SOCs), but, like much of the threat that AI will eventually replace all humanity, is being tempered by reality. Many companies are pushing the idea autonomous response in SOCs tempered with human involvement. The latest is Blackpoint Cyber who have announced their first offering in the area. We are talking with Chief Security and Trust Officer Wil Santiago about how human involvement in security is still a requirement now and for the foreseeable future. This episode is sponsored by Haven

Meta is like Hotel California. You can enter but you can't leave. That's the story I hear over and over. It isn't true. I did and have never looked back. The claims that Meta platforms can improve your business, keep relationships alive, inform the electorate and make a better society have been disproven again and again, but the thing keeps growing. It does that by suppressing the belief that there are alternatives. This podcast talks about how you, your group, your business and your friends can leave the toxic cesspit and find success and mental health in the decentralized world. Sponsored by Haven. Most security tools only know how to shout. Haven doesn't. It's a Chrome browser extension that spots phishing links and attempts before you click, and stays quiet the rest of the time. Free for individual use, at starthaven.com.

This week I talked to the good folks at the Digital Citizens Alliance about a report on residential proxies. Say what? Residential proxies? What the heck are those? They are the apps and hardware products people use to connect to the internet, and they are as secure as a sieve is water tight. The Wall Street Journal published a report on them June 15 and. Back in March the FBI issued an alert abut the dangers they pose. The DCA produced their own report that was, frankly, more informative about the problem. The podcast is sponsored by Haven, a free internet browser extension that protects you from phishing links and malicious sites before you ever click.