Packet Protector
by Packet Pushers
Latest episode
PP132: What the Death Star Can Teach Us About OT Security
PP132: What the Death Star Can Teach Us About OT Security
About this podcast
Join us at the intersection of networking and security! Whether you’re fending off ransomware attacks, securing remote workers, hunting for rogue IoT devices, or gearing up for your latest compliance audit, Packet Protector provides practical information that IT and infrastructure pros can put to work. Every episode covers the latest security headlines and then drills into essential topics to provide technical and strategic insights on wired and wireless network security, access control, cloud security, pen testing and red/blue teaming, security hardware and software, and more. Whether security is your full-time job or one of your many responsibilities, Packet Protector is your go-to cybersecurity resource.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 133 episodes
- PP132: What the Death Star Can Teach Us About OT Security · 25 min · Episode 132On today’s episode we talk about what security teams can learn about OT security from the Death Star. Guest John Burns recaps his CYBR.SEC.CON talk “The Empire Had a SOC — And…
- PP131: Making Security Awareness Training Actually Effective; Plus, How IT and OT Overlaps · 35 min · Episode 131In this double-header episode, JJ and Drew talk with two cybersecurity experts. First up, Jayson E Street talks about how to make security awareness training effective and…
- PP130: News Roundup—FBI and Pentagon Breached, AI Amplifies Threat Actors, UK Rolls Out Passkey Option, and More · 55 min · Episode 130Our October news roundup is a boiling cauldron of consternation. The FBI and the Pentagon suffered breaches, serious exploits are targeting network gear, and researchers discover…
- PP129: Inline Segmentation – HPE Networking’s Easy Button for Zero Trust (Sponsored) · 41 min · Episode 129Sponsor HPE Networking comes to Packet Protector to talk about zero trust inline segmentation. This is a feature available in Juniper switches that can segment LAN traffic using…
- PP128: The Unseen Impacts of AI on Vulnerability Research · 27 min · Episode 128AI models have proven very effective at finding software vulnerabilities. This has dramatically increased the number of people (and agents) who can find bugs. But the number of…
- PP127: Network Configuration and State Visibility at Scale with Unimus (Sponsored) · 51 min · Episode 127Today’s Packet Protector is a sponsored show that sits very nicely at the networking/security intersection. Our sponsor is NetCore, which makes the Unimus network configuration…
- PP126: Trying (and Failing) the CCIE Security Exam · 54 min · Episode 126Today we talk about trying and failing. More specifically, guest Keith Tokash wrote a pair of blogs on Packet Pushers about taking, but not passing, the CCIE Security written…
- PP125: News Roundup—Cyberattack Impacts Pacemakers, OpenAI Publishes Eye-Opening Postmortem, and More · 60 min · Episode 125If it feels like everything is on fire, today’s News Roundup will not dispel that feeling. We discuss consumer routers that ship with factory-installed backdoors, US law…
- PP124: How Coruna, DarkSword, and Other Exploits Slice Up Apple iPhones · 57 min · Episode 124Coruna and DarkSword are exploit frameworks that have successfully targeted Apple iPhones to steal cryptocurrency and harvest data including messages, email, location data, and…
- PP123: Using Gridctl to Keep MCP Configs From Leaking Secrets · 55 min · Episode 123If you’ve been spinning up AI tools — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Copilot, and so on — there’s a decent chance that API keys, credentials, and access tokens are sitting in plaintext…
- PP122: Using Burp Suite to Understand How Apps Collect and Share Our Data · 1 h 2 min · Episode 122Zack Whittaker is a journalist for TechCrunch and author of the newsletter “This Week In Security.” He recently wrote a post describing how he uses Burp Suite, an open source…
- PP121: How CYBR.SEC.CON Builds Community for Learning and Professional Development · 37 min · Episode 121Today we’re doing a crossover episode with the folks at Cybr.Sec.Media to talk about CYBR.SEC.CON, a community-driven security conference that JJ and Drew will be attending in…
- PP120: News Roundup—AI Giants Praise Open Weight Models, Attackers Capture Captive Portals, a Tricky Mac Attack, and More · 1 h 1 min · Episode 120Packet Protector uncorks another News Roundup! We talk about attackers capturing hotels’ captive portals to steal Microsoft credentials, and the OpenAI-attacking-Hugging Face…
- PP119: Automating Firewall Ops To Stay Ahead of AI Threats (Sponsored) · 49 min · Episode 119There’s always been a gap between the discovery of a security issue and the time it takes to remediate. Now AI models can autonomously find weak points and chain together actions…
- PP118: IPv6 Risks In Dual-Stack Environments (i.e. Most Environments) · 1 h 3 min · Episode 118Unless you’ve intentionally migrated to all-IPv6, you’re operating in a dual-stack environment. And if you haven’t accounted for v6 in your monitoring and security, you leave…
- PP117: Automating Firewall Rule Changes – A Real-World Case Study · 1 h 0 min · Episode 117Drew talks with Joao Soares, Lead IT Security Consultant, about a project Joao undertook to automate firewall rule changes. Firewall changes can be fraught in any environment…
- PP116: News Roundup—FortiBleed Reveals Password Cracking Is Alive and Kicking, Accenture Goes All-In on OT, and More · 50 min · Episode 116Looks like it’s going to be a long, hot cybersec summer. The latest news roundup covers how Microsoft 365 Copilot got turned into a data exfiltration tool, why the FortiBleed…
- PP115: Palo Alto Networks: Reality of 109 to 1: Securing Machine Identities and AI Agents (Sponsored) · 39 min · Episode 115Machine identities now outnumber human identities in the enterprise 109 to 1 — and most of them are running without the governance controls you’d never skip for a human employee…
- PP114: MACsec Overview · 49 min · Episode 114MACsec (IEEE 802.1AE) encrypts Ethernet frames hop-by-hop at Layer 2 — before traffic even hits IP — making it one of the strongest protections you can put on wire. It’s been in…
- PP113: Patch Gaps, Pretexting, and AI Use for Crimes and Crimefighting: 2026 Verizon DBIR Highlights · 55 min · Episode 113The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is a postmortem of a year’s worth of cyber incidents and breaches, and a snapshot of how well organizations are responding to…
