Plaintext with Rich

Last Seen - No Signal (Episode 1)

Plaintext is doing something different this September. Instead of breaking down one cybersecurity concept, we’re telling one story across four short episodes. In Episod

Google Selfie Account Recovery: Convenience vs. Privacy

Would you hand Google a video of your face for one more way back into your account? That question gets harder when you are locked out, holding a new phone, and missing ev

AI Security Test Escape: Why Agent Containment Failed

An AI security test was supposed to stay inside a controlled environment. Instead, the models found an unexpected route to the public Internet and reached real Hugging Fa

PTC Windchill Vulnerability: Why Your Product Blueprints Are at Risk

A company can lose its most valuable product plans without a broken lock, an encrypted laptop, or an obvious warning on the screen. The first clear sign may be an extorti

CVE-2026-50522: Why SharePoint Patching Is Only Step One

A critical SharePoint alert arrives, the update goes in, and the ticket closes. But what if an attacker entered before the lock was fixed and left with secrets that still

AutoJack Attack: How Malicious Pages Hijack AI Browsing Agents

You told your AI assistant to book a flight and compare hotels. You come back, and it did all of that. It also ran commands on your machine that you never approved. What

North Korea Mastra NPM Supply Chain Attack: How It Works

You installed a dependency before lunch. Tests passed, app booted, nothing looked wrong. By dinner, your machine had quietly run someone else's code. This episode c

Patch Tuesday 206 Vulnerabilities: AI Discovery vs Remediation Speed

Your update dashboard keeps climbing. Not ten fixes, not fifty. Two hundred and six security patches waiting for approval, and everyone is asking if work stops now. That

Instagram AI Takeover: How Attackers Exploited Meta Support Bots

Your profile photo vanishes. Your email is changed. A password reset you never requested lands in someone else's inbox. You're locked out of your own Instagram

FortiBleed: When Your Firewall Becomes the Front Door

Your firewall is supposed to be the thing that keeps attackers out. FortiBleed is the story of what happens when it becomes the way in. In June 2026, roughly 86,644 sets

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Start the Inventory Before Q-Day

You don't inventory your house the morning of the move. You start months before. So why are most organizations still treating post-quantum cryptography as a 2035 pro

Cybersecurity Careers and AI: The Squeeze and the Opening

Someone pulled Rich aside at a conference recently. Six years in IT, ready to break into security, and asking the question more people ask every week. Should I even bothe

Supply Chain Attacks: How One Update Hit OpenAI

A routine software update. No phishing. No sketchy download. Then a security team finds the unthinkable: trusted code has been hijacked, and the breach rode in through th

Microsoft Exchange Zero-Day Under Attack: One Email Hijacks OWA

It's Monday morning. You open the third email of the day. Nothing visible happens, but in the background, an attacker just borrowed the proof you were logged in. Ep

Work-Life Balance in Cybersecurity: The Structural Fix

You finish at 6:00pm. At 6:47 you reopen the laptop, 'just to check something.' By 9:00 the evening is gone. The boundary didn't fail tonight. It was never

Cybersecurity Burnout: Not a Character Flaw, a System Problem

You're reading a breach report. Third one this month. Last year a story like this would have lit something in you. Today you scroll past it. That's not you. Tha

Physical Health in Cybersecurity: The Body Keeps the Receipts

It's Friday morning. You stand up to refill your water and your back doesn’t move the way it used to. The systems are up and running smoothly. Your body hasn’t gotte

Spiritual Health in Cybersecurity: The Why Behind the Work

Spiritual health on a cybersecurity podcast sounds like a stretch. Stay with us. Because somewhere between the vendor pitches, the patch cycles, and the 3 a.m. page, a lo

Mental Health in Cybersecurity: The Weight of Vigilance

It's 6:47 a.m. The incident was contained hours ago. The systems are fine. You're the one still running hot. This episode opens the Month of Mindfulness, a fiv

Threat Intelligence: Why Most Organizations Get It Backwards

A dashboard lights up with indicators of compromise. The analyst copies the top five into a ticket, tags it "actionable," and sends it to the SOC. Nobody reads it not bec