Packet Protector

Today’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 management software. Unimus supports network automation, configuration management and backup, change management, and auditing and compliance. We dive into how Unimus provides visibility into both the running config and the... Read more »

Today 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 exam. Failure’s a hard thing to talk about, particularly in this age where every public utterance on LinkedIn feels like it has to document one’s ever-upward... Read more »

If 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 enforcement agencies shutting down hacking domains, and how a threat actor tied to China is targeting Cisco IOS-XR routers. Android-based auto infotainment systems are susceptible to malware, OpenAI... Read more »

Coruna and DarkSword are exploit frameworks that have successfully targeted Apple iPhones to steal cryptocurrency and harvest data including messages, email, location data, and browsing history. On today’s show we trace the provenance of these exploits (Coruna was originally developed by a contractor for the US government), their rapid evolution in the cyber underworld, and... Read more »

If 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 on your laptop. With MCP, every quickstart guide tells you to paste your credentials right into a config file. That was a bad habit... Read more »