Podcasts about SolarWinds

Geinbot, SolarWinds, Brave, UNK_Deaddrop, durabletask, Insta, Aaran Leyland, and More on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-588

Geinbot, SolarWinds, Brave, UNK_Deaddrop, durabletask, Insta, Aaran Leyland, and More on the Security Weekly News. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-588

Geinbot, SolarWinds, Brave, UNK_Deaddrop, durabletask, Insta, Aaran Leyland, and More on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-588

Geinbot, SolarWinds, Brave, UNK_Deaddrop, durabletask, Insta, Aaran Leyland, and More on the Security Weekly News. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-588

Jeff and Jim are joined by Heather Flanagan, Content Chair, and Andi Hindle, Conference Chair, for a full preview of Identiverse 2026 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. They cover the 2026 theme of trust and change, why AI was removed as a standalone track and redistributed across all content areas, the provocative argument that non-human access now dramatically outpaces human access and is reshaping identity system design, whether authentication is truly solved, authorization as the harder unsolved problem, CFP surprises, networking events including Women at Identiverse, and predictions for 2027. Save 30% with code IDV26-IDAC30%. New IDPro members save $25 at idpro.org/idac.Connect with Heather: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hlflanagan/Connect with Andi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahindle/Identiverse 2026: https://events.identiverse.com/2026/begin?code=IDV26-IDAC30%25Heather's IAM Conference List: https://github.com/fedidcg/meetings/wiki/2026-List-of-Identity-and-Related-Conferences-and-Standards-Development-EventsConnect with us on LinkedIn:Jim McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmcdonaldpmp/Jeff Steadman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsteadman/Visit the show on the web at http://idacpodcast.comTIMESTAMPS00:00:00 Introduction and SolarWinds breach banter00:03:27 Identiverse preview and discount codes00:06:10 Guest introductions00:06:52 Role of Content Chair00:08:46 Role of Conference Chair00:11:16 2026 conference theme00:15:00 AI as context, not a standalone track00:16:32 Control plane vs enablement plane debate00:22:19 What the industry is underestimating00:24:00 Non-human access outpaces human access00:26:52 Is authentication solved? Passkeys00:30:31 Authorization: far from solved00:36:04 Extensibility in standards and deployments00:38:22 CFP surprises: fraud and identity proofing00:41:48 Usability and UX gaps00:43:18 Agentic AI: identity or governance?00:47:55 Networking and newcomer programming00:51:45 Women at Identiverse00:52:46 AI-generated CFP submissions00:55:00 Predictions for Identiverse 202700:58:04 Theme songs for Identiverse 202601:02:58 Heather's identity conference list on GitHub01:04:47 Swag culture at identity conferences01:12:25 Wrap-upKEYWORDSIdentiverse 2026, Heather Flanagan, Andi Hindle, identity conference, NHI, non-human identity, agentic AI, passkeys, authentication, authorization, IAM, IDAC, Identity at the Center, Jeff Steadman, Jim McDonald, digital identity, continuous identity architecture, zero standing privilege, verifiable credentials, identity governance

Palantir executive considered for CISA leadership EU unveils tech sovereignty package to cut reliance on U.S., Chinese suppliers Hackers now exploit SolarWinds Serv-U flaw to crash servers  Get the show notes here: https://cisoseries.com/cybersecurity-news-cisa-palantir-director-eu-tech-sovereignty-solarwinds-serv-u-flaw/ Thanks to our episode sponsor, Doppel Social engineering attacks look trustworthy — a routine request, an internal email, a familiar face on a call.   But Doppel sees through the disguise. Our AI-native platform detects and disrupts attacks across every channel, while training employees to recognize deepfakes and deception.   We fight relentlessly to protect your business, brand, and people.   Doppel. Outpacing what's next in social engineering.   Learn more at doppel.com.

This is episode 847. Read the complete transcription on the Sales Game Changers Podcast website. Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here. The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here. FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast! Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts! Purchase Fred Diamond's best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now! Today's show featured an interview with Barb Huelskamp, Global Vice President of Channels and Alliances at SolarWinds. Find Barb on LinkedIn.  BARB'S TIP: "Stomp out imposter syndrome. Stomp out fear. I took some fearless leaps early on that I think at this point in my career I would be a little scared to, but I did, and they paid off."

Federal agencies will shift to a priority and risk-based method of logging cybersecurity events under a Friday memo from the Office of Management and Budget aimed at cutting “red tape” and costs. The memo from OMB Director Russell Vought rescinds and replaces a previous directive from the Biden administration issued after the 2020 SolarWinds breach that affected both the public and private sectors. While the previous policy “improved foundational capabilities across agencies,” OMB said the amount of data agencies were required to retain was costly and operationally difficult. In its place, the Trump directive outlines “a risk-based, prioritized logging approach” to logging. OMB's policy comes amid concern about the use of artificial intelligence and automation to fuel cyberattacks. That technology can speed up the process of gaining access to a system and help covertly maintain that access for a long time. It's also increasingly being used by threat actors, the memo said. Anthropic's Mythos large language model is the talk of federal tech and cyber practitioners across the Beltway, and for good reason. According to the company, its month-old Project Glasswing initiative, which allows select researchers to get their hands on the Mythos model, has uncovered more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities across systemically important code, a finding that Anthropic says has shifted the central problem in cybersecurity from discovering flaws to verifying and patching them. The findings, drawn from partner reports and independent evaluations, mark one of the first large-scale accountings of what a frontier AI model can do when pointed at widely used code, and of the bottlenecks that emerge once it does. Several partners reported that their rates of bug discovery had increased more than tenfold. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

In this episode, Raghu Nandakumara sits down with Andrew Rubin, Founder & CEO of Illumio, for a candid conversation about the next phase of AI-driven cybersecurity risk. Just weeks after a major AI breakthrough sparked shockwaves across the security industry, Andrew shares his immediate reaction — from the sobering implications of machine-speed vulnerability discovery to a frank assessment of why the cybersecurity industry's fundamental model may already be broken. The conversation explores what actually changes in an era where vulnerabilities could be discovered and exploited faster than any human-driven operation could manage. Andrew argues that while segmentation as a concept is decades old, its role as a critical backstop has never been more urgent. If attackers begin operating at machine speed, defenders must rethink not just their tools, but their entire operating model — from how they assess risk to how quickly they can respond. Raghu and Andrew discuss: Why the cybersecurity industry has spent more every year while outcomes have gotten worse How AI creates an asymmetric threat unlike anything defenders have faced before Why patching alone won't solve the problem — and the COVID vaccine analogy that explains why The shift from prevention to resilience as the new security north star What the SolarWinds story reveals about how organizations miscalculate tail risk Why segmentation becomes one of the few reliable backstops in a model-driven world How the era of 12-month RFPs and POCs may be coming to a swift and necessary end Stay Connected with our host, Raghu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghunandakumara/ For more information about Illumio, check out our website at illumio.com    Resources Mentioned: Hard Truths in Cybersecurity: Fear, Liability, and the Industry's Biggest Lies | RSAC 2026 Panel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88XjfZBYIw0

Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures Today’s In The Channel episode lands on the same morning that Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures announces the close of Founders Fund I at C$38 million – oversubscribed against an original target of US$25 million, and positioned as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed service provider ecosystem. Managing partner Joel Abramson joined the show to walk through the fund’s thesis and what it means for the channel. Abramson co-founded and led Fully Managed through more than a dozen acquisitions before its $137 million acquisition by Telus Business Solutions in 2021. He joins general partners Chris Day (founder of IT Glue and ScalePad) and Mark Scott (founder of N-able) at Top Down – three operators who between them have spent about 75 years building and scaling companies inside the MSP ecosystem. The fund’s first exit – zofiQ to ConnectWise, which closed in January 2026 – returned 5.3 times the invested capital in roughly six months. Abramson describes it as a case study in what Top Down looks for: founders solving singular problems with exceptional depth, validated by real MSP operators rather than generalist investors. The macro thesis is equally compelling. The global IT services market is projected to grow from $600 billion to over $1 trillion by 2030. And in 2026, SMB IT spend is on track to outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever – a shift Abramson contrasts with what he calls the “SaaSpocalypse” in enterprise, where headcount reductions are translating directly into fewer SaaS licenses. The fund’s LP base of more than 100 MSP operators – including Pax8 – acts as a flywheel for validating investments, sourcing design partners, and connecting portfolio companies with the customers best positioned to stress-test what they’re building. Find Top Down Ventures, including their newsletter and annual research report, at topdown.com. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you caught The Buzz this morning – and you really should have – you already know the headline. Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures has closed Founders Fund I at $38 million Canadian, oversubscribed, as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed service provider ecosystem. The story behind it, though, is rich. Top Down was founded with three partners with deep roots in the Canadian channel community: Chris Day of IT Glue and ScalePad, Mark Scott who founded N-able, and today’s guest, Joel Abramson, who ran Fully Managed through more than a dozen acquisitions before its $137 million sale to Telus Business Solutions in 2021. The fund already has its first exit in the books. zofiQ, an agentic AI platform for MSP service desks that ConnectWise acquired just six months after Top Down’s investment, at 5.3 times the invested capital. Joel joined me this morning to talk about why MSP software needs its own dedicated venture fund, what the first exit tells us about where agentic AI is headed, and one market shift that has the team genuinely excited about the decade ahead. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Joel Abramson. Joel, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Joel Abramson: Great to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: I wanted to start with the origin story here. I think it’s an interesting one in that you had a big role in building and running Fully Managed through a dozen or so acquisitions, then sold – instead of going off and retiring on a boat somewhere or that sort of thing, you ended up in venture investing in specifically MSP software. Can you walk me through how that happened? How did Top Down come together? Was this something that you sought out or something that Chris Day pulled you into? How did that happen? Joel Abramson: Yeah, well, let’s be clear – I do love being on boats. To tell the origin story, you get to go through a 25-year journey of the MSP ecosystem itself, because there are three general partners: Mark Scott, Chris Day, and myself, Joel Abramson. Our journey dates back to the early 2000s when Mark Scott started N-able, and he was one of the pioneers that really helped value-added resellers and break-fix IT service providers become MSPs. I meet people every time I’m out on the road who have a story about working with N-able – transitioning their revenue model from break-fix to recurring. N-able is a phenomenal company today and I think Mark’s legacy lives on there. Mark started that company and then exited just before the SolarWinds acquisition. Then he went on to start a service provider called CareWorks – an MSP focused on senior care facilities. A really interesting vertical, as well as broad SMB. But I’ll pause his story and focus on Chris, because Chris is founder and chairman and really sets the vision for Top Down. Chris had an MSP as well back in the early 2000s. Eventually that was Fully Managed, and that’s where I joined him. I had a small – much less successful – MSP called Packetsafe Networks, and I rolled my little MSP into Chris’s marquee MSP, Fully Managed, and together we set on this journey. We wanted to bring that company to ten cities with $10 million in revenue in each city and then sell it to a Canadian telco – and it’s not revisionist history, it was actually the goal. But then a couple of years into our shared journey at Fully Managed, Chris got pulled into building software. It was because I’d built a bunch of software for Fully Managed to run on, and he made the mistake – or the fortuitous opportunity – of showing it to his peer group. His peer group was like, “I want to use that.” So he said, “Okay, well, I’ll build it for you.” He started building a documentation platform from the ground up and called it IT Glue, and that was a phenomenal ride for him – taking it from a couple of peer group mates trying it out to selling to Kaseya in 2018 and building a very large company in a relatively short amount of time. Not without a tremendous amount of hard work and grind. He was on the road with pop-up banners signing up logo by logo by logo in the early days, but eventually the movement just took shape and every MSP realized that they needed a documentation platform, and IT Glue took off. So IT Glue exits to Kaseya in 2018. Chris has to make that decision: do I want to golf and travel for the rest of my life, or what brings me joy? And so he actually started Top Down as a way to re-engage back with the MSP community. He had an early portfolio of three companies: Warranty Master, a company he had started with his brother; Backup Radar; and Quoter. Together those three early companies started to grow at their own individual pace. Keep in mind, we’re still running Fully Managed over here – I’m running it for him. Then we ended up putting Fully Managed together with Mark Scott’s MSP, and that’s how the three of us came together. Then yes, we did a number of acquisitions. We grew Fully Managed to be $100 million in revenue. It wasn’t the straight line Chris and I had talked about – ten cities in ten years – but it was maybe seven cities. The bridge version: Telus came in and said they wanted to acquire Canada’s largest MSP, which was Fully Managed at the time. They had done a bunch of research and nine months later we consummated that transaction, at the end of 2021. I’d been working with Chris for a number of years on the early-stage portfolio, because we’d get a couple of calls every month with people saying, “Hey, I’m starting this project, Chris, are you interested in taking a look?” So we started to build this reputation as investors in early-stage MSP software companies. We tried some other stuff – everything from consumer packaged goods (we still have a couple of investments) to starting a country music label, which we’ll save for another time. But we always knew our home, I think, was in the MSP space. After the Fully Managed exit, we decided we wanted to really compound our impact. We had this idea of a venture fund – and maybe I’ll pause there, because I can continue the journey, but we’ll wait and see if you have any questions up to that point. Robert Dutt: Understandable. It’s a wild journey, and it really is back to the heart of the early days of the MSP movement – as you say, from break-fix and VAR models. I guess tell me a little bit about where you’re at now. The fund is positioned as the first institutional VC targeting early-stage software and AI for this ecosystem. Why do you think this space needs a dedicated fund? What does a generalist venture fund miss or get wrong when they’re looking at the space? Joel Abramson: We’ve been doing early-stage investing for a few years – five years. At the same time, Warranty Master became ScalePad, and ScalePad started to gain really, really great momentum. ScalePad brought in a growth equity partner, Integrity Growth Partners, who are just phenomenal folks. They capitalized the business and that grew ScalePad from $10 million to $50 million. They were great partners, great board members, and we watched these guys – we were like, wow, we’ve been through this journey a couple of times. They add a lot of value, and we’re really excited about that relationship. We were doing our thing with the early-stage companies, and so we looked across the ecosystem. We said, there is a ton of capital that’s ready to invest in companies in the MSP ecosystem when they get to a certain scale – that was kind of the scale that ScalePad had gotten to. Then we looked down and said, well, what about the guys that are just starting out? There’s not a ton of support. There’s a ConnectWise pitch contest that grants $60,000 or $70,000 to early-stage companies. And there are early-stage investors – we’ve seen companies like Pax8 and Huntress go through many rounds of financing and they started somewhere. But we saw that the strongest source of capital in the MSP ecosystem was actually coming from angel investors. It was Joe Paniterri and Kevin Blake and Channel Angels, and they had done a number of deals, bringing together really early-stage capital and putting $100,000 into a business fueled from a number of different folks. That’s really, really cool. But where’s all the venture? You look across horizontal software and there are funds of venture that just pour in. In the big markets – the Valley and New York – and then in secondary markets, there are funds focused on those areas. But we saw early-stage MSP software companies as vastly overlooked. So we said, what if we could bring together capital from the MSP ecosystem? Because we’ve made plenty of millionaires just by acquiring them with Fully Managed. You look at how that scales out across the ecosystem: you’ve got Evergreen and Integris and Thrive and all these folks buying up MSPs. The stats are over 200 search funds, family offices, and MSP aggregators buying MSPs right now. That’s generating a lot of wealth for a lot of people. Then you have MSPs that are super profitable and people are making good cash flow. Then you have all the software companies that have exited with similar stories to Chris’s. There’s actually quite a bit of capital that could be put to work back into the ecosystem if we just found a way to harness it and focus it on innovation. We said, instead of doing a couple of deals a year, what if we could make 8 to 10 investments a year by bringing capital together? And then what if we could build a system around that to take everything we’ve learned working with early-stage companies – applying those practices, bringing folks together for design partners, early customers, advice, and partnerships in the MSP ecosystem? So we set out to raise a $25 million venture fund, and we said we were going to focus on educating the MSP ecosystem on what investing in a venture fund looks like, because it’s really just going to fuel innovation for MSPs themselves. Our goal was to have half the fund raised from the MSP community and half from outside – similar to what it was at Fully Managed: let’s tell the world about what a great opportunity exists in MSP. We were super successful in the first bucket. We got really well received by the MSP community. We have over 100 LPs in the fund and we exceeded our target of $25 million. In the second bucket, we still have a lot of work to do. We’re one year into our Outliers podcast, we’ve produced one white paper, and we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of conversations in the institutional community, educating funds of funds and family offices on the opportunity for early-stage MSP software investing. We only got a couple of participants in this fund – which is all right, because it shows the strength of the MSP ecosystem. We still oversubscribed our target. But we’re excited to continue that journey of educating institutional investors for our second fund and beyond. Robert Dutt: You mentioned you’re in at the early stage. Where in the lifecycle do you typically start looking, and what does a target portfolio company look like at the point you’re getting involved? Joel Abramson: I’ve only been doing this for a few years, so I’m still learning some of the language, Rob. But we talk about early stage being right at inception – which is called pre-seed, the first money into a company. Maybe they have an idea of what they want to build, a prototype, a business plan, some people, but they haven’t actually started that path to launch – all the way up to around that first million or million and a half of revenue, where they’d be called a late-seed investment or an early Series A. So maybe it’s the second money in, or in a Series A it could be the third. But really we’re focused on the early stage where we can leverage the strength of our LP base – a lot of strong MSPs – as well as the strength of the community that Top Down works to enable and bring together. That can be for design partners, early customers, folks to help with advice, and then partnerships in the MSP ecosystem. Maybe a company is working with ScalePad to solve a problem and ScalePad can help by bringing that product to its customer base. It’s really about building the things that matter most to MSPs. And that’s why I think we love this ecosystem so much – it’s a partnership of vendors and service providers. If we look forward to how AI is going to impact things, you have small and medium businesses at the frontline – all the enablement use cases there, all the cybersecurity use cases. Then you have the service provider layer, which is MSPs helping them with all those things. Then you have a middle layer of supply chain software like the companies we invest in. And on top of that, you have the hyperscalers, the cloud companies, the frontier companies. That four-tiered system really matters, because without the innovation from Microsoft and Anthropic, the macro doesn’t move forward. But very rarely is it going to go straight from there into frontline workers’ hands. The two layers in between – the layer we invest in, and the MSPs themselves – are really what’s helping bring the value from the top to the end market. We think it’s an incredibly resilient ecosystem. We think there’s nobody better positioned to help with AI transformation than MSPs. And that layer between the frontier companies and the hyperscalers and the MSPs is really important – that’s where innovation happens on their behalf, and that’s the kind of companies we’re investing in. Robert Dutt: One example of that would be zofiQ, which I think was your first exit – and some pretty startling numbers there: a six-month turnaround, selling to ConnectWise, bringing back more than 5x what you put in. What did you see in that company that made you say “we’re in,” and what did the ConnectWise acquisition tell you about the market for PSA and agentic AI and where that’s all headed? Joel Abramson: It starts with Lee and his team. We get the fortunate opportunity to look at a lot of things that are being built and we’re still learning, trying to keep pace. As the last couple of years have played out, we’ve been students of what people are building and how they’re looking at solving problems, armed with the knowledge of the last 25 years of the ecosystem. When we met Lee, we were really impressed with him as a founder. He had a strong track record of purpose-building solutions. When Chris and I sat down with him, it was obvious he was solving singular problems with a tremendous amount of depth, versus some of the other folks we’d seen building solutions who were really going an inch deep and a mile wide. Knowing how mission-critical these solutions are to MSPs – that for every time they mess up a service ticket, they put that customer relationship at risk – we knew that Lee’s approach was just bang on. He was obsessed with solving singular use cases. It showed in the team he put together, the technology he built, and what customers were saying about the product. It’s very atypical to make an investment and then six months later have it acquired. When it was all going down and we were talking to the ConnectWise folks, it was bittersweet. We’re so happy to see ConnectWise gain this incredible capability, but we were sad to know we weren’t going to have Lee in the Top Down portfolio anymore. Ultimately, thrilled – because what it means for ConnectWise is that they can get this really powerful technology into a lot of people’s hands. That has a tremendous impact for the ecosystem, the end market, the MSPs partnered with ConnectWise. They can get this great innovative technology out into the market much faster than Lee could on his own, just going out and telling the story and waiting for the momentum to build. Thrilled for ConnectWise, thrilled for Lee and the team to jump into an organization like ConnectWise. And proud that we were able to play a tiny part on that journey. Robert Dutt: zofiQ was automating the service desk with AI agents. From what you saw inside that experience with them, and looking across the portfolio now, I’m curious – especially given your background running an MSP – when you’re talking to MSPs about what some of these companies are doing, how ready are they to adopt and operationalize this kind of agentic tooling? Both in terms of willingness and interest, which I’m sure is high, and actual aptitude and ability to make the operational changes that come with it? Joel Abramson: It totally depends on the MSP’s maturity. I’ve been through the life cycle of MSP maturity many times – two steps forward, one step back, a bunch of times. Every MSP is on a similar treadmill of growing and maturing, then having to embrace new technology, then getting hit by outside factors: whether it’s COVID, the move to remote work, the push back to the office, or the change in technology. It’s not a static industry, but it is an industrial-strength ecosystem because it’s so mission-critical for the customers MSPs serve. Everybody is at their own part of the journey. Companies like zofiQ come around and they focus on building the right technology, then working with the ideal MSPs that are at a place where they can embrace it. I go back to an inspirational investor, Dave Lahn, who always talks about the different buckets of work: the hero work, all the work that supports the hero work, and then all the work that should be done but isn’t. I think about MSPs with that third bucket. As a 20-year MSP operator, there were all these things I knew I wanted to do but could never get around to because we were always fighting fires, then trying to do proactive work, then project work – it compounds and you never had enough hands for the work that should be done that isn’t. I think that’s one of the huge opportunities with AI – actually getting that work done, staying on top of it, and providing more stable, secure environments for MSP customers. If AI is the great enabler for MSPs themselves, then how exciting is it to be in a position where I can’t think of a service provider that supports small and medium businesses that’s better positioned to bring AI enablement down to that market than an MSP. I doubt it’s the accountant, I doubt it’s the janitor or the maintenance people. I think it’s the MSP, because you’re already talking technology. As MSPs continue to evolve from the server room to boardroom conversations, AI is an incredible hook to get into that conversation. That’s why the work ScalePad does around customer success and supporting the strategy conversations is so critical. But the next wave of companies we see are really around helping MSPs actually deliver AI use cases successfully to their customers. That transformation will take place for a long, long time. Robert Dutt: Your base of limited partners includes more than 100 MSP operators, including Pax8. That’s unusual for a VC fund. Was that a deliberate choice? And how does having operators as limited partners actually change how you source and evaluate deals? Joel Abramson: It just makes us so strong. We have the brainpower of over 100 people there for us to tap and leverage. At our Horizons event in November – where we bring all of our LPs together – I’ve never seen a more aligned group of individuals, focused on supporting the supply chain of an ecosystem, come together and have meaningful conversations without any real individual agenda. We think about it as a flywheel. We have a group of limited partners with all of our capital in this fund together. Of course we all want to make money – but I think what drives that outcome is supporting innovation and figuring out exactly where the best place to put capital is today that can have the largest impact tomorrow. zofiQ is a perfect example. Here’s a strong founder with a huge problem, solving it at the deepest level, that MSPs are going to be able to take forward and dramatically impact their businesses and their customer experience. That, to me, is the genesis of venture investing: aligning all those things and putting the right pieces together. We think about the strength of the mindshare of our LPs, figuring out ways to connect them with our portfolio companies, ways to validate our thesis and investments by harnessing that energy, and then making the right investments and providing the right support throughout a portfolio company’s lifecycle, thanks to that really, really strong LP base. Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP owner listening to this – not an investor per se, just someone running a managed services shop – why should I be paying attention to what you guys are doing and what you’re funding? What’s the typical practical downstream impact on my business? Joel Abramson: You could look at our portfolio with a degree of confidence that these companies are getting great support to build great products, that they’re talking to top MSP operators around the world to help shape what gets built. The average MSP is the benefactor of that, because it means they’re getting great product built that they can use in their MSP or deploy to their customers. We’re doing this to earn and keep the reputation that a Top Down-backed company means tier-one innovation, great people behind it, that it’s been validated and tested – and that MSPs themselves can be the benefactor of that by leveraging this technology. Robert Dutt: You closed this fund at about $38 million, oversubscribed, in what you called a slog of an environment – and I get that. What does that tell you about where institutional capital is actually flowing in 2026? And what does a successful Fund I set up for Fund II? Joel Abramson: A lot of institutional capital is flowing towards the frontier companies and the supply chain of AI. We think that’s great, because just like the Microsofts and Googles that have powered the ecosystem for the last ten years, we think heavily capitalized AI companies are fantastic for the downstream companies – the software companies we’re investing in, the AI companies we’re investing in, the MSPs themselves, and the SMB layer. Capital flows down as well. As vertical-focused funds like ours demonstrate a strong track record, more institutional capital will flow into vehicles like ours. Certainly a lot of capital is tied up at the top right now, but we see that as a great thing because we’re not super concerned about the capital cycles of the next three months. We’re much more concerned about the capital cycles of the next two decades. As we’ve mobilized a non-insignificant pool of capital to support early-stage MSP software companies, we strive to earn the right to have a second fund with a more diverse group of participants, and subsequent funds beyond that – as long as we continue to find the right companies to partner with and add value along the way. Robert Dutt: And that seems like – just with the names you’ve mentioned and the names I can think of off the top of my head – a target-rich environment. There are lots of companies building specifically for the MSP market for obvious reasons. But I’m curious: without necessarily naming names or tipping your hand, what problem or product category are you most excited about in the MSP software pipeline right now? Where’s the white space that’s still underbuilt? Joel Abramson: In our research paper, we talk about two big macro things happening in the market right now. One: we think this market – let’s broaden it to IT services, not just MSP – is going from a $600 billion addressable market to a $1.3 trillion addressable market, certainly $1 trillion by 2030. That’s a huge market. On the MSP side specifically, we have four or five scaled companies at or above a billion in revenue. Ninja is on its way up there. N-able, of course, is a big company. But you’re talking about a much larger addressable market – there’s still empty canvas where new companies can scale up to fill the middle and eventually be alongside some of those platforms. We expect those platforms to continue to grow and thrive, and we hope to build or invest in companies that can partner with them to take advantage of their distribution and ultimately make small and medium businesses better through MSPs. All that said, what are some of those categories? I don’t think it’s new MSPs starting up and buying PSA – that market is fairly saturated. Nor do I think it’s more EDR or XDR – those are pretty saturated markets too. There’s still market share that will trade, don’t get me wrong, and innovation will build on top of it. But doubling the market requires new products, new revenue streams, and obviously AI is a critical part of that. Whether it’s the evolution of agentic service work to do all the work that should be done but isn’t, or raising productivity levels so the service is that much better, or helping the average SMB with a sophisticated IT strategy that evolves into an AI strategy – we see the category of AI services enablement for MSPs as a huge, huge opportunity. In the enterprise, we’re living through what I call the SaaSpocalypse – the idea that big SaaS companies are going to see fewer licenses because people are going to downsize headcount and thus take an impact on their top line. But we see the SMB market as more resilient, because my accountant with 60 people and one person in marketing – they’re not going to downsize that one-person marketing department. That person is actually just going to get that much better thanks to all the tools they’re using. SMB IT spend is expected to outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever in 2026. We believe that’s because of the resiliency of the SMB market – the idea that when a big tech company lays off 5,000 people, those people don’t all sail off into the sunset. A lot of them move into the SMB economy and start small businesses. Maybe the IT folks start an MSP. So we see the SMB part of the economy continuing to thrive, and it’s showing itself this year – thanks to this crazy stat that SMB IT spend will outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever. For all those reasons, we’re very excited about the opportunities it creates in the companies that we’re invested in. Robert Dutt: That is a crazy stat, and it’s worth underlining – because of where you and your peers and so much of this community is focused, right in that SMB space. And closer to home, as a Canadian podcast, we’re very much a nation of SMBs. So it really is super impactful here. Joel Abramson: Yeah, I would agree. Robert Dutt: For people who want to follow what you guys are doing – whether they’re founders, MSPs, or just interested in what’s coming in terms of new AI-first MSP software – where do they find you? How can they find out more? Joel Abramson: TopDown.com. We publish a newsletter and try to share all the learnings we’re gaining each quarter. We publish a white paper annually. We have a conference in November called Horizons – if you’re interested in investing in the MSP ecosystem, our goal is to bring everybody together as peers. We do a lot of dinners and events around the big MSP events. Our goal is always to bring everyone together as peers, not in a supplier relationship where you’re being sold to – just everybody trying to solve this thing together. The community aspect of the MSP ecosystem is so strong, and that’s how you engage. I’m pretty easy to find and always interested in a conversation with anybody from inside the ecosystem or outside, as we try to build this thing one brick at a time toward 1.3 trillion of addressable market. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. Go get that. Go build that. I appreciate you taking the time, Joel. Joel Abramson: Thank you so much for having me. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Joel Abramson from Top Down Ventures. I’d like to thank Joel for his time this morning. Thank you as always for listening to In The Channel. A few things stuck with me from this conversation. First, the framework Joel described: frontier AI companies at the top, then the supply chain software layer that Top Down invests in, then MSPs, then SMBs at the front line. It’s a clean way to think about how AI value actually gets delivered to small and medium businesses. And the point that MSPs are the most natural vehicle for that delivery is hard to argue with – from where I sit, and probably from where you sit too. Second, that stat about SMB IT spend outpacing enterprise IT for the first time ever this year. If we’re in what Joel calls the SaaSpocalypse for the enterprise, we’re in a resilience story for SMB. For an audience of MSPs, that’s your market, and that’s your moment. And the zofiQ story. A six-month hold, 5.3 times the invested capital to ConnectWise. What Joel said about what made it work – going deep into a singular problem rather than an inch deep and a mile wide – is as much a product philosophy lesson as it is a venture capital story. If you want to follow what Top Down is doing, find them at TopDown.com, where they publish a regular newsletter and annual white paper on the state of MSP capital. Their Horizons conference runs every November if you’re engaged in this ecosystem as a founder, an operator, or an investor. If you’re enjoying the show, please give the podcast a follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or most of the major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always encouraged. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In this special edition of CyberWire Daily's 10th anniversary series, N2K CyberWire's Maria Varmazis and Dave Bittner discuss cybersecurity geopolitics and warfare that have been in the news over the past 10 years. We begin our conversation around the supply chain malware from the destructive NotPetya campaign out of Russia, then Maria and Dave highlight: Olympic Destroyer disrupting the Pyeongchang Games, CozyBear's SolarWinds espionage campaign, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware disruption, Russia's full invasion of Ukraine paired with Viasat hack, Iranian hackers attacking ICS devices at water treatment plants in Israel, and China's VoltTyphoon and SaltTyphoon intrusions in critical sectors. Join us as we reflect on the escalation from election interference and disruption, to espionage and ransomware as national security crises, to integration in kinetic war,and now expansion into space, with AI-driven defenses and NATO codifying cyber as a collective defense domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at Overalls What if your employees had one central hub to handle real life? Meet Overalls. A smarter way to support your team, combining expert human LifeConcierges™ with AI to solve everyday challenges across healthcare, caregiving, benefits, insurance, finances, life admin, and more. From start to finish, Overalls handles the details — using existing benefits where they fit, and filling in the gaps where they don't. So employees save time, reduce stress, and stay focused at work, while employers boost engagement and get more value from their benefits. Overalls is redefining how work supports life, helping employee teams from Reddit, Patreon, BeatBox, and more cross pesky to-dos off their lists every day. Learn more at https://getoveralls.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=pozcast Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com TAKEAWAYS: 1. Global Benefits Require Local Listening There is no universal benefits playbook. What matters to an employee in Bangalore — where the daily commute can be a two-hour ordeal — is fundamentally different from what matters to someone in Austin or Cork. Companies with global teams need to engage local employees to understand what's actually meaningful, rather than exporting the US benefits model everywhere. 2. Transportation Is an Underrated Global Benefit In cities like Bangalore and Manila, commuter benefits can have a more meaningful daily impact than gym memberships or wellness stipends. Dave's team is actively exploring cab subsidies and transportation allowances as targeted benefits for teams in markets where commuting is genuinely burdensome. 3. Mental Health Benefits Only Work If Confidentiality Is Real and Communicated On-demand therapy platforms drive adoption when employees genuinely believe their sessions are private. People leaders need to actively and repeatedly communicate that they have zero access to individual usage data — because the fear that HR is watching is a real barrier to utilization, even for platforms that are genuinely confidential. 4. Aggregate Mental Health Data Is a Strategic Signal Even without individual visibility, the top themes surfaced by a mental health platform — stress, burnout, anxiety — give people leaders actionable intelligence about where the organization needs to go deeper. That's qualitative data that should be feeding benefits strategy and manager training. 5. What Candidates Care About Depends on Where They Are in Life Junior employees ask about food and gym benefits. Senior employees want to know about 401(k) match and parental leave. But across every level and every geography, candidates are asking to see the benefits package — and those conversations are happening on par with base salary discussions. 6. Elder Care Is the Next Major Benefits Frontier — and It's Personal for Dave Dave went through the elder care journey for both parents with nothing from his employer to help navigate it. That experience led him to advise an elder care platform and made him one of the most vocal advocates for this benefit category. His message: companies that don't build something here in the next few years will lose the sandwich generation employees who need it most. 7. The Elderly Population Is About to Eclipse the Child Population in the US The demographic shift is imminent. The sandwich generation — employees simultaneously raising children and caring for aging parents — is about to become the dominant workforce cohort. People leaders who are not designing benefits for this reality are already behind. 8. Concierge Benefits Address the Real Cost of Being Away The most relatable benefit Dave wishes he had: someone to handle real-life logistics when you're traveling for work. A fallen tree, a lawn that needs cutting, a home emergency — the mental load of worrying about what's happening at home while you're on the road is a real productivity drain that concierge services can address. 9. HR Needs a Purposeful AI Design — Not a Default One Dave's key insight from Transform 2026: the most important AI conversation in HR isn't about what AI can do — it's about what you want it to do. Mapping capabilities and making deliberate decisions about where AI takes over and where human judgment is protected is the strategic work that separates thoughtful people organizations from reactive ones. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Introduction Adam welcomes Dave Hanrahan from SolarWinds, fresh off a panel session, and sets up a conversation about global people leadership and benefits. 02:00 – Meet SolarWinds & Dave's Role Dave describes SolarWinds — a B2B IT observability platform — and his role as SVP of People, including joining two weeks before an acquisition and managing a team spanning six countries. 04:30 – Managing a Global Workforce Up Close Why Dave prioritizes getting out to international offices in person, and what you can only understand about site culture when you're actually there. 07:00 – How Benefits Work Around the World A rarely discussed topic: how benefits are structured differently by country, why one-size-fits-all doesn't work globally, and what SolarWinds is learning about meeting employees where they are in each market. 10:00 – Transportation Benefits in Bangalore & Manila The standout benefit conversation: why commuter subsidies matter more than gym memberships for teams in some of the world's most congested cities — and how SolarWinds is working with local teams to figure out the right solution. 13:00 – Mental Health Benefits & the Confidentiality Challenge How SolarWinds approaches global on-demand therapy benefits, why anonymity is the key to adoption, and what aggregate data from the platform tells Dave as a people leader about workforce stress trends. 16:30 – How Benefits Are Priced & Structured A practical breakdown: per-employee session allotments, how utilization is tracked, when the company raises session limits, and how group sessions expand access across the organization. 19:00 – What Candidates Actually Ask About in Total Comp Dave's generational breakdown: junior employees ask about food and gym benefits; senior employees go straight to 401(k) match and parental leave. And across the board, every candidate asks to see the benefits flyer. 22:00 – The Elder Care Gap — Dave's Personal Story Dave's most personal moment in the episode: going through elder care for both parents with zero company support, becoming an advisor to an elder care benefits platform, and why he believes this is the next major benefits frontier. 26:00 – The Sandwich Generation Is Here The data point that stops the conversation: the US elderly population is about to eclipse the child population. Dave and Adam get real about what that means for employees caught in the middle — raising kids while caring for aging parents. 29:30 – Concierge Benefits & the Value of Peace of Mind What Dave wishes he had as an employee traveling for work: concierge services that handle real-life logistics — the lawn, the fallen tree, the home emergency — so employees can focus on the job. 32:00 – Mapping AI to HR: What to Automate, What to Protect Dave's aha moment from Transform 2026: the importance of purposefully mapping which HR functions should become agentic versus where human judgment — on hiring, promotions, compensation, feedback — must be retained. 35:00 – Keeping the Human at the Center Dave's words of optimism: at this conference, HR leaders are pushing back on the narrative that AI should replace human judgment. The energy at Transform is about keeping people at the heart of the most important decisions.

Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, joins The Tech Trek to talk about one of the biggest shifts happening inside IT and engineering teams: AI is moving people from operators to orchestrators.The conversation goes beyond faster code and automation. Krishna explains why AI is changing how teams think about systems, governance, validation, observability, and the skills technical leaders will need as work moves from manual execution to higher level oversight.Key Takeaways• AI is raising the level of abstraction for IT and engineering teams. The work is shifting from operating systems manually to designing systems that can increasingly run, adapt, and respond on their own.• AI does not automatically reduce workload. In many teams, it changes the type of work by moving effort from execution into validation, judgment, risk management, and governance.• Code generation is only one part of the delivery system. Without testing, security review, observability, and strong engineering process, faster code can create more problems faster.• The best AI outcomes depend on strong foundations. Clean data, connected systems, clear ownership, and resilient architecture matter more as AI becomes part of core workflows.• Technical professionals will need stronger systems thinking, business context, adaptability, and domain understanding as AI changes the shape of day to day work.Timestamped Highlights00:00Krishna Sai joins the show and sets the stage for a conversation about AI, IT responsibility, skill gaps, and the latest SolarWinds IT Trends Report.02:14Why IT is moving from operator to orchestrator, and what that means for teams that used to spend most of their time responding to tickets and manually managing systems.04:54Krishna explains why AI feels different from prior technology shifts. This is not just infrastructure change. It touches individual workflows, jobs, and decision making.08:56The messy middle of AI adoption. Teams are getting faster at some tasks, but the workload has not disappeared. It has moved into validation, review, and oversight.14:46How AI may force teams to rethink the software delivery cycle, sprint structure, feedback loops, and the speed at which customer issues can be resolved24:27Krishna shares how principles from distributed systems, including loose coupling and high cohesion, can help leaders build AI systems that can change without breaking everything around them.Standout Moment“AI is a multiplier. It does not magically fix all your problems. It multiplies your current state.”Pro Tips• Do not measure AI success only by how much faster a team can generate code or complete a task.• Look at the full system around the work, including testing, review, security, observability, and ownership.• Build AI workflows with enough flexibility to swap tools, models, and processes as the technology changes.• Invest in systems thinking and domain knowledge. Those skills become more valuable as execution becomes easier to automate.Call to ActionSubscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations with technology leaders on how AI, data, engineering, and modern systems are changing the way companies build.

Tim Coach, chief evangelist at Cynomi For most managed service providers, the security services story has followed a familiar arc: endpoint protection, email security, security awareness training. Each category added value, then became table stakes. Third-party risk management – TPRM – is what comes next, and according to Cynomi Chief Evangelist Tim Coach, it may be the stickiest revenue category yet. The case is straightforward. Every business relies on a web of vendors, software providers, and service partners. Each one is a potential vulnerability. And most SMBs have no formal process for knowing how well those third parties are managing their own security – or what happens to them downstream if one of those vendors gets breached. Research from Cynomi suggests 45 percent of organizations will face supply chain attacks, and 30 percent of data breaches already involve a third party. The attack surface has shifted to the things organizations trust most. For Canadian MSPs, the regulatory pressure is specific and near-term. OSFI’s Guideline E-21, with a September 2026 compliance deadline for federally regulated financial institutions, puts third-party oversight explicitly on the agenda. The cascade effect on their vendors – and the MSPs serving those vendors – is already in motion. Perhaps the sharpest signal in this conversation: cyber underwriters are now denying SMB coverage not because of anything the SMB did, but because they are connected to an MSP. The managed service provider, long positioned as the path to better insurance outcomes, has become a risk factor in its own right. Coach’s recommended first move for any MSP building into TPRM isn’t a vendor questionnaire – it’s a Business Impact Analysis. Understand how the client actually makes money, which vendors are critical to those revenue processes, and what an hour of downtime costs. That reframes the conversation from technical widgets to revenue, cost, and risk – the language every business owner speaks. – UPLOAD AUDIO Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, your host for the show. My guest today is Tim Coach, Chief Evangelist at Cynomi, a vCISO platform purpose-built for MSPs and MSSPs. Tim brings an unusually grounded perspective to the space. He’s an engineer by training who spent nearly two decades building, running, and consulting on managed service practices before landing at Cynomi after seeing the platform first-hand and recognizing it could have solved one of his biggest operational headaches as an MSP owner – the CISO bottleneck, the point at which growth stalls because the security function can’t scale without adding expensive headcount. That personal history shapes everything he thinks about TPRM, third-party risk management, which is increasingly being talked about as the next major revenue category for MSPs after human cyber risk. Today we’re talking about what building a TPRM practice actually looks like, why cyber insurance has quietly flipped the MSP value equation, and why the right starting point isn’t a vendor questionnaire at all. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Tim Coach. Tim, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Tim Coach: I absolutely love to be on. Thanks so much for having me, and for having Cynomi on your webinars. We’re always happy to do these things and educate the community. Robert Dutt: You’ve spent a long time in and around the MSP community. How did you end up at Cynomi specifically, and what was it about the opportunity around TPRM that pulled you in? Tim Coach: TPRM was eventually in the process – let me back up. What got me into the community was my engineering background. I went to college for what was called network communications back in those days. Basically I’m a network guy – I always point at the front-end programming guy and say, “It’s your fault,” and the programming guy says, “No, no, it’s the network’s fault.” So I did that for a large-scale nationwide company for many years, and then I fired my MSP. The owner was like, “Well, if you’re so good, why don’t you come over here and run this?” And I said okay. It took me about 24 hours to realize I didn’t have a clue what was going on – the place was chaos. But through process and procedure, and a military background, I knew I could get it under control. I ended up with a business partner from that experience, and we spent about 20 years rebuilding and consulting with MSPs. About five years ago, I just needed something different. The kids were a little older. I started looking at what else was out there, talked to a couple of mentors in the space – I’m sure if I mentioned their names everyone would know them – and they said, “You should come over and do this.” So I jumped. I went to work for a Canadian company, grew them quite a bit in the first year, then moved to an Australian company, grew them, and then went back to consulting for a short time. David from Cynomi was recommended to me as a consulting connection. We were going back and forth and he said, “Why don’t you come on board?” And I said, “I’m not really interested in selling a widget” – and it’s a security widget, right? There are so many great widgets and great personalities in the security space already. Probably not my jam. But he said, “No, no – let’s look at it.” And he showed me what Cynomi did, and I was blown away. The reason I was blown away is that at my most successful MSP, we hit a stopping point in our growth. The reason was our CISO – and this was before CISO was even a cool term. He was our bottleneck. Not because he was inefficient as a person, but because of the way he had to work: 80 pages of Excel spreadsheets and hours and hours of questionnaires. When I first saw Cynomi, I thought, “Here’s a way I could have doubled the size of my company with the same staff, the same CISO.” That’s what really inspired me to come on board – seeing that dashboard and connecting it to the personal pain I’d experienced around the security bottleneck. Now with the addition of TPRM, that excites me even more, because back in my MSP days I had a lot of bank clients, and banks are SOC 2 all over the place. Part of SOC 2 is that you have to have TPRM – you have to be responsible for everybody in the chain. So now we’ve built out a platform that lets the MSP, MSSP, ITSP, or whatever SP you want to put in front of those letters, easily manage vendor relationships and understand where clients are in their security posture. Robert Dutt: You may not feel it’s cool, but it’s certainly foundational security. Tim Coach: And that’s the problem, right? That’s why we’re still talking about security – because nobody knows how to talk business. They all talk widgets, bits and bobs: here’s this cool firewall, MDR, XDR. But you know what your clients don’t care about? The widgets. They care about being secure. Until we can bridge that gap – until Cynomi brings something that says, here’s an easy way to get to the data and details you need, here’s CISO-level intelligence so the MSP can translate it into business terms for the doctor’s office, the manufacturing company, whatever vertical you want – we’re going to keep having this same conversation. Robert Dutt: Let’s do a little bit of that with TPRM itself. Let’s take a step back and look at it from the viewpoint of an MSP who’s heard the acronym but hasn’t really dug in yet. Third-party risk management – what are we actually talking about, and what problem does it solve? Tim Coach: What a lot of people need to understand – and I try to say this in a way that’s easy to grasp – is: manage security first, and compliance becomes a default. What I mean is that you need a baseline, whether it’s CIS Controls, Cyber Essentials Plus, CMMC 2.0, one of the financial frameworks, HIPAA, whatever applies. You need a baseline you’re actively managing your security against. In the process of meeting that baseline, compliance follows. What we’re increasingly seeing is that certification bodies, auditors, and insurance underwriters all want to see that your solutions and partners are just as secure as you are. I was at Canalys Barcelona last year and someone made a statement that blew me away: for the first time ever, we’re seeing insurance underwriters deny coverage to an SMB because they’re connected to an MSP – and the MSP is what they consider the risk. We went from being the most important people in the room, essential workers, to being the risk factor. And on top of that, helping clients with their insurance has been one of our foot-in-the-door conversations for the last decade. That’s where TPRM comes in. The frameworks and insurance underwriters now want to see not just that you’re secure, but that everyone you’re working with is secure. The problem has always been how you manage that. Back in my day, you had to call the vendor, find the right person, ask for evidence of their SOC 2 compliance, get bounced around, end up with legal, sign an NDA, and eventually get the report. Now people share that information a bit more freely, but you still need a central place to manage it – so when an auditor or insurance broker asks, you can point to it and say, “Here it is.” We do a community call every Wednesday at noon Eastern, and we’ve had a gentleman on a couple of times who has written books specifically on TPRM. He’s sounding the alarms – not bad alarms, just “it’s coming.” But like a lot of SMBs, MSPs are having to drag their clients toward where they need to be. Once you make it easy for the MSP, you make it easy for the SMB, and you finally have a way to prove you’re taking those measures. Robert Dutt: Supply chain attacks have certainly been a theme in the channel for a while – Kaseya, SolarWinds, MOVEit. But TPRM as a formal managed service element feels newer. The insurance side sounds like a big driver. What else changed to make it go from a theoretical concern to something MSPs can actually build a practice around? Tim Coach: I firmly believe you cannot be a business partner without knowing how your partner makes money and how you need to protect them. I can’t protect them if I don’t know what they’re using. It’s the old adage: if two people are managing something, nobody’s managing it. TPRM is really the next step for the ITSP to move from a transactional relationship to a true business partnership – ensuring that everyone your clients are using is also protected. Because what happens is what always happens: it doesn’t matter what you have hard-coded in the contract about not being responsible for X. When something goes wrong, the SMB comes back and says, “But I thought you were managing this.” We go over it in the contract reviews, sure, but the conversation still happens. When you’re genuinely talking business – saying, “I’m going to protect how you operate quarter after quarter, year after year” – you’re protecting their entire environment, not just your piece of it. That’s when you move to a real business relationship instead of a sales relationship where every conversation is an upsell or a cross-sell. We’ve done it to ourselves a little bit, honestly. It’s like an insurance agent in Oklahoma trying to sell hurricane insurance. That’s not what we should be doing as business partners. TPRM allows us to have a full understanding of the client’s environment and make sure everything is protected – or at minimum, that the gaps are known by everyone. Robert Dutt: Cynomi has described TPRM as the next major revenue category after human cyber risk. Can you walk me through what the recurring revenue model actually looks like, and what makes it sticky? Tim Coach: Everything leads to MRR – that’s business. But you have to start with a project. You need to understand where the client is in their security journey before you can manage them ongoing. SMBs don’t do things for free, and neither do our partners. This is a revenue generator. But it’s a revenue generator because it actively has to be managed. I always say: I can’t throw a server at security. I can’t throw a firewall at it and declare myself secure. The best analogy I’ve heard for security is a block of Swiss cheese. There are holes, and you can stick a fork through those holes quite a way. But if you slice that block and turn every slice 90 degrees, the holes are still there – they’re just not as deep or vulnerable. That’s TPRM. There is no set-it-and-forget-it. It has to be actively managed, and that active management is where the recurring revenue lives. Robert Dutt: What does a typical engagement look like early on, for an MSP starting from zero with a client? Where does the work begin, and what surprises people about the scope as they go deeper? Tim Coach: Everything begins with an assessment. With Cynomi’s tools, we can use Cyber Essentials Plus or CIS Controls as a self-regulating baseline and add a couple of hours to the initial assessment to incorporate the security piece. We all do assessments upfront to understand what we’re getting into – or what needs to be fixed before we really dig in. Once you’re in the security layer, the next step is TPRM. And TPRM brings with it something I think is critically important: the Business Impact Analysis. It’s not enough to ask, “What does your client do?” They make dog food – do they? Or is that just the end product? When I was an MSP, I had a metal manufacturer that cut and stamped metal. But if you asked their CFO what the business was, he’d say, “Making pallets – I make more on pallets than on the stamping work.” I used this example in a presentation just yesterday. Years ago I was walking through a manufacturer’s facility and asked about a machine: “What does that one do?” “That runs the software that completes our product.” “Why isn’t it plugged into the network?” “It’s a Windows 98 machine.” “Why are you still running that?” “Because it runs decade-old German software that costs ten million dollars to replace. And we only have that one machine.” If you’re not walking through and genuinely understanding how they make money, you don’t know where the risks are. And that’s what TPRM forces you to do. Ideally, I’d love to sell a project that includes a full security assessment, a BIA, TPRM, BCP, IR planning, all of it from day one. But it doesn’t happen that way. You have to phase it. Once you understand the BIA and what they’re actually doing, you understand where the software and systems that carry real business risk are, and you can start building that into their security posture. It’s the same principle: why hack an individual when you can hack the software that manages all the individuals? Why try to crack one account when you can compromise an MSP’s RMM tool and get access to everybody? If you go into a business without understanding their software environment and vendor posture, you at minimum need to be able to tell them where the risks are. Because the language they speak is revenue, cost, and risk. TPRM is a risk if it’s not being managed – and that’s why we’re seeing so much attention on it lately, even though some of us have been doing this for decades. We just used to call it vendor management. Robert Dutt: We’ve talked a lot on the show about MSP tools as an attack surface – RMM agents, remote access tools, backup platforms. The MSP is supposed to be managing the client’s vendor risk, but the MSP’s own toolchain is also someone else’s third-party risk. How should MSPs be thinking about that? Tim Coach: It comes back to the BIA again. What are they using? What’s creating the security gaps, and how do you build better overall management around it? There’s a project in there, but every project should lead to MRR – period. It still has to be managed. Remember when Exchange servers went away and everyone panicked about where the revenue was going to go? There was still an entire environment to manage. We always made some revenue on hardware, though that’s gotten harder – the real money is in managing the ongoing environment. TPRM is the same thing: it’s a significant security gap in the overall posture of your clients, and that gap has to be actively managed. Robert Dutt: Pushing on that a little further – TPRM platforms are pulling in a pretty comprehensive map of an organization’s vendor ecosystem: the gaps, what’s been remediated, basically a full picture of the landscape. If one of those platforms gets compromised, that’s not just a breach – that’s a pretty rich target list for an attacker. How do you think about that? Tim Coach: Think about a CNC factory. Their job is building molds to produce a specific part, and the software on their server has all the schematics fully built out. What happens if that software gets hacked? You lose all the schematics for the CNC machine – so suddenly you can’t produce anything. And if the attacker gets in early enough in the process, the downstream supply chain impact goes way beyond that one facility. That’s the risk. If you’ve got $200,000 five-axis CNC machines – and I may have a little experience with this – and you’re not protecting the software running them, and you don’t understand from a TPRM perspective what the vulnerabilities look like, that’s an ongoing, persistent risk. You always have to be managing it. Robert Dutt: Sitting where Cynomi is, how do you think about the security side of running a TPRM solution, and what should MSPs be asking vendors in this space about that? Tim Coach: Efficiency. How efficient can you make it? I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but we’ve essentially stupid-proofed the first few levels. We’ve built it out for you. And look – I know AI is a word we’ve managed to avoid for about the last half hour, but AI is meant to enhance the human. It’s a tool. What we’ve done at Cynomi is build AI agents and intelligence into the platform to make this work manageable at a lower labor level. If I can take work that previously required a CISO – an expensive asset – and bring it down to a tier-two technician, my margins go up because my labor costs go down. That said, we’re not replacing the CISO. I used to work with a company that built a component for Apache helicopters – no public-facing anything. If a tier-two tech runs a report showing no web security for that client and flags it as a critical gap, the CISO might be the only person who knows that client has no public-facing presence by design. That context matters. The CISO still needs to be the final approval layer. What Cynomi has done is open up bandwidth for other people to do the groundwork, so you can grow your company without adding another six-figure salary. When your staff becomes more efficient, the CISO is less of a bottleneck – which was the original problem we started with. Robert Dutt: For the Canadians listening, there are some very specific regulatory drivers on the table right now. OSFI’s Guideline E-21 has a September 2026 compliance deadline for federally regulated financial institutions. Can you talk about the role you see TPRM playing in responding to that kind of regulation? Tim Coach: What we’re seeing is that the insurance underwriters, auditors, and regulators are the ones setting the standard, and the industry has to meet it – but the industry isn’t yet at a point where it can easily meet a TPRM standard. So what will probably happen, whether it’s Canada, the US, the UK, or EMEA, is a pattern we’ve seen before: they’ll release a guideline, there’ll be a period of voluntary adoption, and then they’ll give it teeth. Like HIPAA – they threw it out there, and eventually it got enforcement. The thing I’ve always loved is watching the auditors, because they’re typically running a couple of years ahead of the regulation. If you stop treating auditors like your mortal enemy – “they’re here to expose everything I’m doing wrong” – and start paying attention to what they’re flagging, you can get ahead of the game. Auditors are a leading indicator. It’ll always come down to government forcing the policy, and then insurance trying to find a way out of paying claims when it’s not followed. But if you’re watching the auditors and TPRM is showing up in their reviews, you already know what’s coming. Robert Dutt: For an MSP listening to this and thinking, “I should be doing this” – what’s the realistic first move? Not the ideal end state, but the practical starting point? Tim Coach: Start with the BIA – the Business Impact Analysis. Research suggests every SMB has three to five critical processes that drive about 80% of their revenue. Do they actually know what those are? Probably not. They make dog food. They take care of kids. Whatever it is – they don’t actually know how they make money. I have an old client who’s also a friend – he works in retirement planning. If you asked how he makes money, you’d assume it’s from managing portfolios. It’s not. He makes money by selling the policy, and the insurance company pays him a commission on that. If you don’t start by understanding the BIA, you don’t really know what solutions your clients are dependent on. Start with: who is your critical software outside of us? Who maintains it? Do we have a relationship with them? Does it connect directly to how you make money? And tie it to cost of downtime. If a doctor’s office goes down for four hours – and in a medical practice you call them providers, not doctors, right? Speaking their language, not ours – what does that cost? If the pallet machine on an assembly line goes down, and that pallet machine is the only thing holding product so the rest of the line can keep moving, what’s the cost per hour? If you don’t know that, you don’t actually understand how to service your client. You’re still talking bits and bobs instead of revenue, cost, and risk. Robert Dutt: Future-looking question to wrap up: where do you see this category going over the next couple of years? Is TPRM a standalone practice, or does it fold into a broader vCISO or governance offering? Tim Coach: I think it’s going to be both. For more mature MSPs, it’ll be baked right into their silver, gold, and platinum packages – TPRM is just part of what you get at a certain tier. For others, especially those that aren’t at a full vCISO-as-a-service level yet, it’ll be available as a standalone – a meaningful piece of the security posture they can deliver to clients without committing to the full stack. Growth and maturity, right? As people build their practices, the more advanced will have it embedded. But there’s also a real path for someone starting out to say, “I need to at least get this piece right, because it’s critical to the overall security posture of my clients.” Robert Dutt: Fascinating. It’s an interesting area of technology and – to your greater point – business. I appreciate you taking the time to share some thoughts on how service providers can get involved. Tim Coach: Thanks for having me on. I always appreciate it. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Tim Coach from Cynomi. I’d like to thank Tim for taking the time today. He’s been around the MSP space long enough that when he points at something and says it’s the next thing, it’s worth listening. A few things I want to make sure land from this conversation. The first is the Business Impact Analysis as the true starting point. Before you think about vendor questionnaires or risk scoring tools, you need to understand how your client actually generates revenue – which processes drive the majority of the business, and which vendors are load-bearing in that equation. That’s not a security conversation. That’s a business conversation. And that’s the shift that moves an MSP from tool vendor to genuine business partner. The second is the insurance signal. When underwriters start denying SMB coverage not because of something the SMB did, but because they’re connected to an MSP – that’s a warning and an opportunity in the same breath. MSPs who can demonstrate they’re actively managing their clients’ third-party risk have a new and better story to tell. And the frame to carry with you: security first, compliance becomes a default. Build the practice to the right security baseline and the compliance checkboxes largely take care of themselves. In The Channel is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major podcast directories. If you’re finding value here, ratings and reviews are always appreciated – they help other people in the Canadian IT channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

The dominant structural shift identified is the emergence of agentic AI as a direct operator within multi-system business environments, triggering a governance and accountability gap. Vendors and cloud platforms—including AWS, Stripe, and Cloudflare—are enabling AI agents not only to recommend actions but also to directly access payment rails, provision infrastructure, and execute transactions. This movement turns automation into an operating model issue rather than a feature deployment, as the identity, authority, and accountability of non-human actors become central operational questions. Primary evidence is drawn from a range of industry signals. According to an AMD-commissioned IDC report, 81% of enterprises are engaged in AI PC adoption and 61% are embedding AI into workflows. AWS has expanded managed agent packaging for AI deployments, Stripe has launched the Link wallet allowing AI agents to process payments on users' behalf with controls on payment credentials, and Cloudflare has demonstrated agents autonomously provisioning cloud resources with enforced monthly spend limits. While these statistics carry vendor-driven optimism, the combined actions of these companies confirm a shift from advisory AI to operational AI. Related developments reinforce this trajectory. The SolarWinds survey reported by Computer Weekly finds 71% of IT workers experiencing higher demands due to AI, with only 19% noting reduced cognitive load, reflecting operational burdens rather than efficiencies. Similarly, Forrester data cited by The Register highlights a change in CIO responsibilities from system building to outcome governance as agentic AI exposes gaps in decision rights and process completeness. Security risks are elevated, as the Kela report counts 2.86 billion stolen credentials in a year, indicating that agent-driven credentials can trigger machine-speed purchases and changes, compounding the challenge of oversight and recovery. Operational implications for MSPs are significant. Without explicit governance, spend limits, approval paths, and audit trails, MSPs face increased liability and support burden when AI agents initiate actions across client systems. The episode underscores that automation is not just a technical project but a contract and service design issue; if accountability is not clearly defined, MSPs bear the risk and cost of unauthorized transactions and exception handling. To mitigate exposure, there is a need to formalize agent governance as a priced, intentional service encompassing identity management, financial controls, and documented operational guardrails before agentic AI is deployed in client environments. 00:00 Agents Take Over 04:39 Who's Accountable? 06:48 Who Owns This? 09:58 Why Do We Care?    Supported by:  NerdioScalePad    Upcoming event:  The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera

The SEC charged a CISO personally for a cyberattack. Not the company. The individual, Tim Brown. Tim fought back, and won. In the age of AI, every security and business leader needs to ask: Am I next?When the SolarWinds supply chain attack hit in 2020, Tim Brown became one of the first CISOs in history to face personal SEC charges. That case changed the conversation around CISO accountability permanently. With AI inside your enterprise, making decisions, generating outputs and influencing risk, the accountability question has not gone away. It has grown. With that, so has the personal liability exposure for every security leader expanded.In this episode, Monica Verma sits down with Tim Brown, Former CISO of SolarWinds, to talk about what it actually means to be held personally accountable, how he navigated the charges, and what every CISO, security architect, and risk leader needs to understand before their organisation deploys AI at scale.This is not a theoretical conversation. It already happened to one of us.Looking to go from chaos and unpredictability to resilience in the world of AI? Start here with The Predictability Factor newsletter at The Monica Talks Cyber (https://www.monicatalkscyber.com).

Sponsor Link:This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. For the best online protection and a great price check out our special deal: Click HereSpaceTime Series 29 Episode 48 *Finding that young Sun like stars dim quickly is good news for life A new study has discovered that young Sun like stars settle down and start to dim more quickly than previously thought, potentially benefiting orbiting planets and the prospects of life. *A surprisingly speedy solar wind found in inner corona A new study has found that the solar wind is travelling up to four times faster than expected in the Sun's inner corona. *Dream Chaser passes another critical milestone The Sierra Space Dream Chaser space plane Tenacity has just completed launch acoustic testing at NASA's Space Systems Processing Facility. *The Science Report Long-term HIV remission achieved following a stem cell transplant. How to save Venice from rising sea levels. Half of all answers to health and medical questions by AI found to be problematic. Alex on Tech: The 6G countdown has begun.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/spacetime-with-stuart-gary--2458531/support.

The company you hired to protect you just got hacked. That is not a hypothetical, it is the defining threat pattern of the past 18 months. In this episode Darnley breaks down why cybersecurity vendors, including some of the most recognized names in the space, have become the highest-value targets for threat actors, how a single vendor compromise translates directly into a supply chain breach affecting hundreds or thousands of downstream clients, and what every business needs to do before signing another security contract. Featuring real-world case vendors including SolarWinds, Okta, CrowdStrike, Sisense, and the 2026 eScan compromise, plus a practical vendor vetting playbook and a hard look at why infrastructure-level privacy matters more.Listen hereClick here to send future episode recommendationSupport the showSubscribe now to Darnley's Cyber Cafe and stay informed on the latest developments in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

The deadline for federal agencies to implement risk management practices for high-impact AI use cases — or terminate them — has come and gone, but a handful of departments are still working to complete their requirements. FedScoop reached out to 28 federal agencies to inquire about the steps they have taken to ensure compliance within the April 3 timeframe. Some agencies fulfilled the requirements, like the Labor Department, NASA, the VA, State, GSA, and the EPA, while others reclassified use cases or still have a couple boxes to check. A few appear to have missed the deadline entirely. As outlined by an Office of Management and Budget memorandum, uses considered high-impact are required to comply with minimum risk management practices, which include pre-deployment testing, impact assessments, adverse impact monitoring, adequate human training and assessments, appropriate fail-safes that minimize harm, consistent appeal processes, and options for end users to submit feedback. The Department of Justice is asking Congress for a major boost in fiscal 2027 to the fund it uses to support IT modernization and enterprise cybersecurity, with the entire increase going directly to the agency's zero-trust cybersecurity architecture. DOJ has requested $149 million for its Justice Information Sharing Technology fund as part of the Trump administration's fiscal 2027 budget request. Congress appropriated $38.5 million for the program in the past two fiscal years. The primary difference between this request and the funding enacted in the most recent years prior is the $110.3 million that DOJ says it needs to support its migration to a zero-trust architecture for its unclassified and national security systems. To put that into perspective, Justice requested a more meager $11.8 million increase to the JIST fund's topline in fiscal 2026 for “cybersecurity posture enhancement,” which it did not get. In its congressional budget justification for 2027, Justice explains that despite an industrywide shift to zero trust as the cybersecurity model of choice in response to the SolarWinds attack on federal agencies in 2020, its funding for cyber was cut by $108 million in fiscal 2024 and remained essentially flat since then. “Enacted funding levels over the past three years are below the level required to cover DOJ's over 275,000 endpoints and approximately 160,000 users,” the budget document states, adding that “the current funding levels impact the Department's current defenses and constrain its ability to adapt to evolving threats.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Annual Security Symposium. Visit: https://ceri.as/2026 Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming both the opportunities and risks within cybersecurity, creating a new landscape that today's students and researchers will soon inherit and shape. This keynote explores how AI is evolving from a supporting tool to a decision-making system, fundamentally changing how cyber threats are created, detected, and managed. It will examine emerging risks such as deepfakes, model manipulation, and systemic dependencies on shared technologies, while also addressing the growing role of regulation and the challenges of governing systems that are powerful yet often opaque. Most importantly, the session will highlight where the greatest opportunities lie—at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and policy—and how the next generation of professionals can play a defining role in building secure, resilient, and trustworthy systems for the future.  About the speaker: Brian J. Peretti is a career member of the Senior Executive Service at the United States Department of the Treasury. In his final position, he served as Treasury's Chief Technology Officer and Deputy Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer in the Office of Chief Information Officer.As Treasury's Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Peretti establishes, leads, and manages a comprehensive, multi-year strategic and long-range planning process that promotes the vision for IT and ensures consistent progress toward accomplishing the CIO's vision, while identifying and leveraging common technology solutions to support business processes and work methods and/or to improve effectiveness of current technologies while also developing appropriate policy for emerging technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Biometrics and Quantum Computing. As Treasury's Deputy Chief AI Officer, Mr. Peretti supported Treasury's Chief AI Officer in advancing the Department's deployment of this emerging technology. In this capacity, he oversaw the publication of Treasury's report, Managing Artificial Intelligence-Specific Cybersecurity Risks in the Financial Services Sector, and directed the subsequent lines of effort. Additionally, serving in this position has seen him designated as the Executive Officer for the Department's AI Governance Board as well as the Department's representative to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's CAIO Council. In addition, Mr. Peretti leads the development of domestic and international operational resilience policy, including cyber, as part of Treasury's Sector Risk Management Agency responsibility for the financial services sector. In this role, he spearheads Treasury's efforts to increase multi-directional sharing of cyber threat and vulnerability information. He also serves as the United States's designated subject matter expert at the Group of 7 Cyber Expert Group (G-7 CEG). Mr. Peretti has served at the Treasury for over 22 years with increasing levels of responsibility, including being named the Senior Career Official Executing the Duties of the Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions during the transition from the Obama to the Trump Administration. Based on his expertise in critical infrastructure protection and operational resilience, he was detailed to the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's National Risk Management Center during the intial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and served as the first Senior Advisor for Security and the Economy. He also speadheaded DHS response to the SolarWinds cyber incident. A sought-after speaker and presenter, Mr. Peretti has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career. Most recently, he received the 12th Annual Billington CyberSecurity Leadership Award at the 2023 Annual Billington CyberSecurity Summit. Prior to joining the Treasury, Mr. Peretti was an associate in Shook, Hardy & Bacon's Corporate Banking and Finance Section in Washington, D.C., and was the General Counsel for the Wright Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union. He has authored numerous publications related to financial sector operations, including payment systems. Mr. Peretti received his bachelor's degree from Rider University (cum laude) in 1989, and his law degree from American University's Washington College of Law (cum laude) in 1992.

In this special edition of CyberWire Daily's 10th anniversary series, N2K CyberWire's Maria Varmazis and Dave Bittner discuss the biggest breaches over the past 10 years. The foundational 2014 Sony hack kicks off our conversation, then Maria and Dave highlight: the 2015 OPM breach, which exposed sensitive security-clearance data and was attributed to long-term access by China amid outdated government systems and security 2017's WannaCry and NotPetya's global disruption and Equifax's ongoing fallout the 2020 SolarWinds breach underscored supply-chain risks and raised concerns about potential personal criminal liability for CISOs. The conversation illustrates two main threat-actor categories—nation-state espionage and financially motivated criminals—and the increasingly blurred lines between them. Join us as we reflect on how the industry and cybercrime have evolved over the past decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Iran threatens tech firms as hackers strike Stryker. The EU advances efforts toward digital sovereignty. A foreign hacker stumbles upon the FBI's Epstein files. DOGE used ChatGPT to cull humanities grants. Meta claims increased efforts against scams. A Wisconsin ambulance provider discloses a data breach. CISA shortens the patch deadline for a critical SolarWinds vulnerability. We preview this year's RSAC 2026 Innovation Sandbox with Cecilia Marinier and Paul Kocher. Dangerous digital diets miss the mark.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest On our Industry Voices segment, we share a RSAC 2026 Conference innovation preview with Cecilia Marinier and Innovation Sandbox judge Paul Kocher talking about this year's Top 10 Finalists. Selected Reading Iran-linked hackers claim responsibility for attack on US medical device maker Stryker (Reuters) 'Legitimate targets': Iran issues warning to US tech firms including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia (The Times of India) Iranian trolls are flooding social media with pro-Tehran, anti-war propaganda (MS Now) Commission announces €75 million EURO-3C Project to build a federated Telco-Edge-Cloud infrastructure for digital sovereignty (European Commission) Hacker broke into FBI and compromised Epstein files, report says (TechCrunch) When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities (The New York Times) Meta says it culled millions of scam ads amid accusations that it profits from them (The Record) Bell Ambulance Ransomware Attack Impacts Over 237,000 Individuals (Beyond Machines) CISA Mandates Emergency Patching for SolarWinds Web Help Desk Vulnerabilities (Beyond Machines) AI Chatbots Are Giving Teens Absolutely Terrible Diet Advice, Study Warns (Gizmodo) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this SolarWinds TechPod episode, hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk with Cheryl Nomanson, a SolarWinds Academy trainer with 14 years at the company. They discuss the importance of technical education for complex software and networks, exploring SolarWinds' comprehensive training offerings including the SolarWinds Academy with its on-demand courses, instructor-led virtual classes, and office hours format. Cheryl explains the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP) certification program and the newer SolarWinds Certified Instructor (SCI) program for training partners globally. The conversation covers different learning formats, comparing virtual versus in-person instruction challenges and benefits, the importance of customer feedback in developing training content, and best practices for internal employee education. They emphasize how proper training helps customers realize the full value of SolarWinds products by providing not just functional knowledge but strategic understanding of why features work the way they do.

SolarWinds patches four critical remote code execution vulnerabilities. A ransomware attack on Conduant puts the data of over 25 million Americans at risk. RoguePilot enables Github repository takeovers. ZeroDayRat targets Android and iOS devices. North Korea's Lazarus group deploy Medusa ransomware against organizations in the U.S. and the Middle East. Attackers' breakout times drop to under half an hour.  CISA maintains its mission despite staffing challenges. Russian satellites draw fresh scrutiny. Two South Korean teenagers are charged with breaching Seoul's public bike service. Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, discusses why leaders should focus less on speculating about an AI bubble, and more on how to quantify AI's tangible contributions. The Pope pushes prayerful priests past predictable programs.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, discussing why leaders should focus less on speculating about an AI bubble, and more on how to quantify AI's tangible contributions. Selected Reading Critical SolarWinds Serv-U flaws offer root access to servers (Bleeping Computer) Massive Conduent Data Breach Exfiltrates 8 TB Affects Over 25 Million Americans (GB Hackers) GitHub Issues Abused in Copilot Attack Leading to Repository Takeover (SecurityWeek) New ZeroDayRAT Malware Claims Full Monitoring of Android and iOS Devices (Hackread) North Korean state hackers seen using Medusa ransomware in attacks on US, Middle East (The Record) CrowdStrike says attackers are moving through networks in under 30 minutes (CyberScoop) Shutdown at D.H.S. Extends to Cyber Agency, Adding to Setbacks (The New York Times) From Cold War interceptors to Ukraine: how Russia came to park spy satellites next to the West's most sensitive tech in orbit (Meduza) Korean cops charge two teens over Seoul bike hire breach (The Register) Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies (EWTN News) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show.  Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it take to go undercover with international cybercriminals — with no backup, no safe house, and no script? In this episode of The Audit, Richard LaTulip, Field CISO at Recorded Future and former U.S. Secret Service agent, pulls back the curtain on three years of undercover operations spanning Thailand, Dubai, Macau, and China. From buying stolen credit card data in bulk to handing cheap government-issued laptops to disappointed hackers, Richard shares the raw, unfiltered reality Hollywood never shows you. Co-hosts Joshua J Schmidt, Eric Brown, Nick Mellem, and Jen Lotze dig into the psychology of social engineering, the stark differences between nation-state and financially motivated threat actors, and why your employees are simultaneously your greatest asset and your biggest vulnerability. Richard breaks down how SolarWinds revealed the patience of nation-state operations, why cultural awareness is a cybersecurity weapon, and how organizations can shift security from a cost center to a value driver. 

On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's cybersecurity news, including: Microsoft reshuffles security leadership. It doesn't spark joy. Russia is hacking the Winter Olympics. Again. But y tho? China-linked groups are keeping busy, hacking telcos in Norway, Singapore and dozens of others Campaigns underway targeting Ivanti, BeyondTrust and SolarWinds products An unknown hero blocks 23/tcp on the US internet backbone And James Wilson pops into talk about Claude's go at a C compiler This week's episode is sponsored by Ent.AI, an AI startup that isn't quite ready to tell us all what they're doing. But nevertheless, founder Brandon Dixon joins to discuss AI's role in security. Where does language-based understanding take us that previous methods couldn't? This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes Updates in two of our core priorities - The Official Microsoft Blog Strengthening Windows trust and security through User Transparency and Consent | Windows Experience Blog Microsoft prepares to refresh Secure Boot's digital certificate | Cybersecurity Dive Microsoft Patch Tuesday matches last year's zero-day high with six actively exploited vulnerabilities | CyberScoop Microsoft releases urgent Office patch. Russian-state hackers pounce. - Ars Technica Italy blames Russia-linked hackers for cyberattacks ahead of Winter Olympics | The Record from Recorded Future News Researchers uncover vast cyberespionage operation targeting dozens of governments worldwide | The Record from Recorded Future News Germany warns of state-linked phishing campaign targeting journalists, government officials | The Record from Recorded Future News Norwegian intelligence discloses country hit by Salt Typhoon campaign | The Record from Recorded Future News Singapore says China-linked hackers targeted telecom providers in major spying campaign | The Record from Recorded Future News Largest Multi-Agency Cyber Operation Mounted to Counter Threat Posed by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Actor UNC3886 to Singapore's Telecommunications Sector | Cyber Security Agency of Singapore How Intel and Google Collaborate to Strengthen Intel® TDX Strengthening the Foundation: A Joint Security Review of Intel TDX 1.5 - Google Bug Hunters Active Exploitation of SolarWinds Web Help Desk (CVE-2025-26399) | Huntress EU, Dutch government announce hacks following Ivanti zero-days | The Record from Recorded Future News North Korean hackers targeted crypto exec with fake Zoom meeting, ClickFix scam | The Record from Recorded Future News BeyondTrust warns of critical RCE flaw in remote support software Rapid7 Analysis of CVE-2026-1731 Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes Anthropic (1) Post by @ryiron.bsky.social — Bluesky What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works | AISLE South Korean crypto exchange races to recover $40bn of bitcoin sent to customers by mistake | South Korea | The Guardian White House to meet with GOP lawmakers on FISA Section 702 renewal | The Record from Recorded Future News

In this episode of Security Squawk, Bryan Hornung, Reginald Ande, & Randy Bryan break down three stories that should change how executives think about cyber risk. This is not about tools, alerts, or vendor promises. It is about operational dependency, leadership accountability, and financial exposure when systems fail. Story one focuses on active exploitation of SolarWinds Web Help Desk vulnerabilities being used as an entry point for ransomware staging. Researchers are seeing attackers move fast after initial access, blending in by using legitimate remote management and incident response tools. That is the point. When attackers use normal looking admin utilities, many organizations do not detect the intrusion until the business impact is already locked in. If you run Web Help Desk or you have not verified your patch posture, this is a governance issue, not an IT debate. Patch timelines and exposure management are leadership decisions because they directly affect business interruption risk. Story two is a warning about the ransomware market adapting. As more organizations refuse to pay for data theft only extortion, threat actors are expected to pivot back toward encryption. Encryption creates urgency because it disrupts operations. The financial exposure shifts toward downtime, recovery labor, lost revenue, and customer churn. Executives should treat restore capability like a business continuity requirement. If your recovery plan has not been tested under pressure, it is not a plan. Story three covers the BridgePay ransomware incident and the downstream impact on merchants and local government services. Even when payment card data is not confirmed compromised, availability failures still create real harm. Customers do not care which vendor was hit. They only see that your business cannot process transactions. This is a clear reminder to revisit vendor criticality, SLAs, outage communications, and contingency processing options. Security Squawk is built for business owners, executives, board members, and IT leaders who want the real world impact without the fear marketing. Subscribe, share, and support the show at https://buymeacoffee.com/securitysquawk

Ukraine tightens controls on Starlink terminals VMware ESXi flaw now exploited SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug under attack Get the show notes here: https://cisoseries.com/cybersecurity-news-ukraine-tightens-controls-on-starlink-terminals-vmware-esxi-flaw-now-exploited-solarwinds-web-help-desk-bug-under-attack/ Huge thanks to our sponsor, Strike48 Strike48 is the Agentic Log Intelligence Platform that actually puts AI agents to work, maximizing log visibility without blowing your budget. Find threats your siloed tools miss. Get started today with pre-built AI agents and workflows that investigate, detect, and respond 24/7 or build your own at strike48.com/security.

Dug Song and Jon Oberheide are the co-founders of Duo Security.If you've never heard of Duo, it might be one of the most underrated software stories of all-time.Starting in 2010, they burned only $14 million to hit $100m in ARR, were acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018, and now rumored to be doing over $1 billion in ARR inside Cisco 16 years later.We talk about how they built one of the most capital efficient SaaS companies ever from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and how their focus on the customer and company culture helped them win in a crowded cybersecurity market.We talk growing up in the early hacking culture of the 90s, why most security tools are painful to use, sizing their market, solving for non-consumption of a product, and how Duo flipped the model by designing for end users instead of security teams.We talk about staying in Michigan instead of moving to Silicon Valley, and why staying out of the tech bubble helped them execute.We break down the mechanics of scaling from zero to $100 million in ARR, everything they learned integrating with Cisco, and why more founders should build outside of San Francisco. A quick thank you ex-Duo employees Zack Urlocker, Ash Devata, and Katie Kilroy for their help brainstorming topics for the conversation.Try Numeral, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance: [https://www.numeral.com](https://www.numeral.com/)Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000: https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFzTimestamps:(4:49) Meeting from Dug's Wi-Fi honeypot(7:33) 90's hacking culture and cybersecurity's wild west(14:49) How the internet was born in Ann Arbor(18:58) Staying in Michigan instead of moving to Silicon Valley(31:20) Philosophy on leadership and team building(39:48) What makes a good engineering leader(44:01) Starting Duo to make security easier(45:22) Why most security products suck(48:36) How fixing account takeover became a $1B ARR company(59:10) TAM, competition, fixing the non-consumption of security(1:04:04) Being a radical advocate for the customer(1:08:35) Duo's pizza sales play(1:12:45) Branding lessons from Anthropic, Tesla, Cliff Bar(1:17:47) When to say no to customers(1:21:27) Importance of culture when scaling(1:27:56) Duo's role in uncovering the SolarWinds breach(1:31:29) Scaling to $100M ARR on $14M burned(1:39:30) Inside the $2.35B Cisco acquisition(1:44:02) What big companies get wrong about customers(1:51:53) Building Michigan's startup ecosystemReferencedDuo Security: [https://duo.com](https://duo.com/)Cisco: [https://www.cisco.com](https://www.cisco.com/)University of Michigan: [https://umich.edu](https://umich.edu/)Follow DugTwitter: https://x.com/dugsongLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dugsongFollow JonTwitter: https://x.com/jonoberheideLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonoFollow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau are joined by the newest guy on the Risky Business Media team, James WIlson. They discuss the week's cybersecurity news, including: Notepad++ update supply chain attack has been attributed to China The AI agent future is even more stupid than expected; behold the OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Moltbook mess The Epstein files claim he had a personal hacker? Microsoft is finally getting ready to (think about starting to begin to) disable NTLM by default The usual bugs in the usual things! Ivanti, Fortinet, and Solarwinds. Again. Telco hides a free trip in its privacy policy, someone actually reads it and wins! This weeks's episode is sponsored by opensource IDP platform Authentik. CEO Fletcher Heisler talks to Pat about their new endpoint agent that can enforce device posture policies during login. This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes The Chrysalis Backdoor: A Deep Dive into Lotus Blossom's toolkit Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers | Notepad++ Notepad++ v8.8.3 - Self-signed Certificate: Certified by Code, Not Corporations | Notepad++ Hacking Moltbook: AI Social Network Reveals 1.5M API Keys | Wiz Blog lcamtuf on X: "Moltbook debate in a nutshell" / X Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site AndrewMohawk on X: "How exactly did an attacker send a message to your bot since you need to approve all the channels and set keys etc" / X Signal president warns AI agents are making encryption irrelevant Massive AI Chat App Leaked Millions of Users Private Conversations Runa Sandvik on X: New court record from the FBI details the state of the devices seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson EFTA01683874.pdf Disrupting the World's Largest Residential Proxy Network | Google Cloud Blog Nobel Committee says Peace Prize winner likely revealed early by digital spying | Reuters County pays $600,000 to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security - Ars Technica Advancing Windows security: Disabling NTLM by default - Windows IT Pro Blog Critical flaws in Ivanti EPMM lead to fast-moving exploitation attempts | Cybersecurity Dive CISA orders federal agencies to patch exploited SolarWinds bug by Friday | The Record from Recorded Future News CISA, security researchers warn FortiCloud SSO flaw is under attack | Cybersecurity Dive Fintech firm Marquis blames hack at firewall provider SonicWall for its data breach | TechCrunch We Hid a Free Trip to Switzerland in Our Privacy Policy. Someone Found It in 2 Weeks. - Cape Between Two Nerds: The internal logic of Russian power grid attacks - YouTube

Take a Network Break! We’ve got Red Alerts for HPE Juniper Session Smart Routers and SolarWinds. In this week’s news, Microsoft debuts its second-generation AI inferencing chip, Mplify rolls out a new Carrier Ethernet certification for supporting AI workloads, and AWS upgrades its network firewall to spot GenAI application traffic and filter Web categories. Google... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We’ve got Red Alerts for HPE Juniper Session Smart Routers and SolarWinds. In this week’s news, Microsoft debuts its second-generation AI inferencing chip, Mplify rolls out a new Carrier Ethernet certification for supporting AI workloads, and AWS upgrades its network firewall to spot GenAI application traffic and filter Web categories. Google... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We’ve got Red Alerts for HPE Juniper Session Smart Routers and SolarWinds. In this week’s news, Microsoft debuts its second-generation AI inferencing chip, Mplify rolls out a new Carrier Ethernet certification for supporting AI workloads, and AWS upgrades its network firewall to spot GenAI application traffic and filter Web categories. Google... Read more »

Tim Brown is the CISO at SolarWinds. In this episode, he joins host Paul John Spaulding and Bobby Ford, Chief Strategy & Experience Officer at Doppel, to discuss today's threat landscape and what organizations can do to protect themselves in light of new threats such as deepfakes and artificial intelligence. This episode of CISO Confidential is brought to you by Doppel. Learn more about our sponsor at https://doppel.com.

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Google dismantles a huge residential proxy network. Did the FBI take down the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum? A long running North Korea backed cyber operation has splintered into three specialized threat groups. U.S. military cyber operators carried out a covert operation to disrupt Russian troll networks ahead of the 2024 elections. Phishing campaigns target journalists using the Signal app. SolarWinds patches vulnerabilities in its Web Help Desk product. Amazon found CSAM in its AI training data. Initial access brokers switch up their preferred bot. China executes scam center kingpins. Our guest is Tom Pace, CEO of NetRise, explaining how open-source vulnerabilities are opening doors for nation-states.  An unsecured webcam peers into Pyongyang.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today, Tom Pace, former DOE cyber analyst and CEO of NetRise, joins the show to explain how open-source vulnerabilities are opening doors for nation-states and why visibility into who maintains code repositories matters. Selected Reading Google Disrupted World's Largest IPIDEA Residential Proxy Network (Cyber Security News) Notorious Russia-based RAMP cybercrime forum apparently seized by FBI (The Record) Long-running North Korea threat group splits into 3 distinct operations (CyberScoop) Secret US cyber operations shielded 2024 election from foreign trolls, but now the Trump admin has gutted protections (CNN Politics) Phishing attack: Numerous journalists targeted in attack via Signal Messenger (Netzpolitik.org) Signal president warns AI agents are making encryption irrelevant (Cyber Insider) SolarWinds Patches Critical Web Help Desk Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek)  Amazon Found ‘High Volume' Of Child Sex Abuse Material in AI Training Data (Bloomberg) Initial access hackers switch to Tsundere Bot for ransomware attacks (Bleeping Computer) China Executes 11 People Linked to Cyberscam Centers in Myanmar   (Bloomberg) North Korean Hackers' Daily Life Leaked in Video (The Chosun) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Odd WebLogic Request. Possible CVE-2026-21962 Exploit Attempt or AI Slop? We are seeing attempts to attack CVE-2026-21962, a recent weblog vulnerability, using a non-working AI slop exploit https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Odd%20WebLogic%20Request.%20Possible%20CVE-2026-21962%20Exploit%20Attempt%20or%20AI%20Slop%3F/32662 Fortinet Patches are Rolling Out Fortinet is starting to roll out patches for the recent SSO vulnerability https://fortiguard.fortinet.com/psirt/FG-IR-26-060 SolarWinds Web Helpdesk Vulnerability Another set of vulnerabilities in SolarWinds Web Helpdesk may result in unauthenticated system access https://horizon3.ai/attack-research/cve-2025-40551-another-solarwinds-web-help-desk-deserialization-issue/

Tiered pricing is becoming the simplest way to sell AI-powered SaaS without turning your pricing page into a technical explanation. In my interview with Dan Balcauski, founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, we talked about why AI is forcing new pricing decisions earlier than ever—and why "good, better, best" packaging often works because it keeps buying decisions clear while helping companies manage real AI costs.  The AI era is making pricing margin-aware again. Tiered pricing helps you protect margins without forcing buyers to learn your cost structure.  About Dan Balcauski Dan Balcauski is the founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, where he helps high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. He is a TopTal certified Top 3% Product Management Professional and helps teach Kellogg Executive Education course on Product Strategy. Over the last 15 years, Dan has managed products across the full lifecycle—from concept incubation to launch, platform transitions, maintenance, and end of life—across consumer and B2B companies ranging from startups to publicly traded enterprises. He previously served as Head of Product at LawnStarter and was a Principal Product Strategist at SolarWinds. Why Tiered Pricing Is Winning in the AI Era For years, SaaS companies could price mostly around value because marginal costs were relatively stable. AI changes the math. Dan points out that companies are now cutting meaningful monthly checks to model providers, and leadership teams can't pretend cost-to-serve is irrelevant anymore.  That's a big reason tiered pricing is showing up everywhere right now. It gives teams a way to: Keep the offer simple for buyers Put premium capabilities where they belong Create a natural upgrade path that aligns with value and cost Most importantly, tiered pricing keeps you out of the weeds. The customer conversation stays focused on outcomes, not infrastructure. What Makes Tiered Pricing Actually Work Dan's point isn't "just shove AI into the top tier." Tiered pricing works when plan differences are easy to understand and tied to value drivers customers already recognize.  Here are three practical patterns from the discussion that hold up well in the AI era. 1) Put AI in higher tiers when it boosts a user's output If an AI feature makes a person more effective—faster drafting, better triage, higher quality responses—tiering can be straightforward. The buyer already understands why a "Better" or "Best" plan costs more: it changes the capability of the team.  This is also why seat-based pricing can still make sense for many AI-enhanced tools. If the value driver is still "help my team do better work," then users/seats remain an intuitive anchor.  If AI increases team productivity, tiered pricing can stay aligned to seats—because seats still map to value.  2) Use add-ons when AI changes the value driver Sometimes AI doesn't just "help" the user—it replaces work entirely. When that happens, forcing it into the same tier structure can distort value and create confusion. Dan points to Intercom as a strong example of handling this well: The core support platform stays priced per user (agents), because the value driver is agent effectiveness. Their AI agent ("Fin AI") is priced separately because the agent isn't involved—the value is the number of issues the AI resolves. That's why per-resolution pricing makes sense.  3) Don't make buyers learn token math Dan's strongest warning is about token pricing. Customers don't want to learn what tokens are, and sales teams don't want to explain them—especially when you're selling a business outcome like faster support or better customer experience.  Token-based pricing also shifts the conversation away from value and toward your vendor bill. As Dan puts it, customers don't care about your infrastructure costs, and pushing that complexity into the buying motion adds friction.  If your tiered pricing requires a footnote explaining tokens, you're adding sand in the gears.  A Tiered Pricing Checklist for AI Features Here's a simple way to apply this immediately: Good: Core workflow value, minimal AI (or AI where costs are predictable) Better: AI that boosts team output (speed, quality, throughput) Best: AI that drives outcomes at scale (automation, deflection, resolution) Add-on: Use when AI has a different value driver than the base product (example: per-resolution)  Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, there's always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at info@develpreneur.com with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let's continue exploring the exciting world of software development. Additional Resources Setting Your Development Pricing Fixed or Hourly Project Pricing A Project Management and Pricing Guide for Success Building Better Foundations Podcast Videos – With Bonus Content

Minimal viable pricing is the fastest way to stop debating what your product should cost and start learning what customers will actually pay for. In my interview with Dan Balcauski, founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, we talked about how early-stage teams can set pricing that's "good enough" to sell, validate value, and iterate—without getting stuck chasing the perfect number. Pricing can feel risky because it shapes perception, positioning, and revenue. But Dan's message is practical: you don't need perfect pricing to move forward—you need minimal viable pricing that creates clear decisions and real feedback loops. Minimal viable pricing isn't "cheap pricing." It's "clear pricing" that helps you test value and drive decisions. About Dan Balcauski Dan Balcauski is the founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, where he helps high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. A TopTal-certified Top 3% Product Management Professional, Dan also teaches in Kellogg Executive Education's Product Strategy coursework. Over the last 15 years, he has led products across the full lifecycle—from concept incubation to launch, platform transitions, maintenance, and end-of-life—across both consumer and B2B markets. Before Product Tranquility, he served as Head of Product at LawnStarter and as a Principal Product Strategist at SolarWinds following its $4B acquisition. What "minimal viable pricing" actually means Dan's approach starts with a mindset shift: early-stage companies rarely fail because their initial price was off by 10–20%. They fail because they haven't found a repeatable customer problem, a clear value promise, or a reliable way to acquire customers. Minimal viable pricing means: You set a price you can defend. You package it in a way customers can understand. You use real conversations and real deals to refine it. It's pricing as a learning tool—not a spreadsheet exercise. Minimal viable pricing starts with your "free option" One of the most actionable parts of the discussion was Dan's breakdown of freemium vs free trial—and why it matters so much for minimal viable pricing. A free trial creates urgency. There's a natural deadline, which forces customers to evaluate value and decide. A freemium model can work, but it often creates a huge pool of users who never engage deeply enough to convert. If your goal is to learn quickly, trials often generate clearer signals: Who gets value fast? What feature set drives adoption? What objections stop the purchase? Minimal viable pricing works best when your go-to-market motion creates real decisions—not endless "maybe later." Trial length: don't confuse "short" with "effective" There's a trend toward shorter trials (like 7 days), but Dan's point is simple: a short clock doesn't help if your customer can't realistically experience value in that window. In B2B especially, onboarding delays, competing priorities, and internal approvals can chew up days instantly. A minimal viable pricing approach asks: What's the shortest trial that still allows a motivated customer to succeed? If you're selling to teams, the answer is often longer than you think. Use minimal viable pricing to clarify positioning Dan also shared a framing that sticks: are you selling a Timex or a Rolex? In other words, are you competing on affordability and simplicity—or premium value and outcomes? Minimal viable pricing isn't just about the number. It's also about: The story your pricing tells The kind of customer you attract The expectations you set around results and support You don't need a dozen plans to communicate this. You need clarity. If customers can't tell who your product is for from the pricing page, your "pricing problem" might actually be a positioning problem. The goal: learn faster, not argue longer Minimal viable pricing gives you a way to move forward without pretending you have perfect information. Start with something simple, sell it, listen hard, and iterate. If you want a practical takeaway from Dan's perspective, it's this: pricing is one of your best feedback loops. Use it early. Use it intentionally. And don't let the hunt for "perfect" delay the real work—helping customers win. Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, there's always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at info@develpreneur.com with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let's continue exploring the exciting world of software development. Additional Resources Defining An MVP Properly for Your Goals Price With Confidence: Estimation Made Simple How to Build a Minimal Viable Product Without Blowing Your Budget Building Better Foundations Podcast Videos – With Bonus Content

In this landmark 99th episode of the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast Series, Dr. Dave Chatterjee is joined by Denny LeCompte—CEO of Portnox (https://www.portnox.com/) and a former SolarWinds executive—to examine one of cybersecurity's oldest yet most persistently exploited challenges: access control.Despite decades of investment in passwords, MFA, and perimeter defenses, breaches rooted in access failures continue to dominate headlines. Drawing on firsthand experience—including lessons learned from the SolarWinds Sunburst breach—LeCompte explains why password-centric security models are fundamentally misaligned with human behavior and modern digital environments.Together, Chatterjee and LeCompte argue for a decisive shift toward passwordless, device-centric, zero-trust access models that assume human fallibility, eliminate implicit trust, and dramatically reduce attack surfaces. Framed through Dr. Chatterjee's Commitment–Preparedness–Discipline (CPD) lens, the episode reframes access control not as an IT configuration issue, but as a core pillar of cybersecurity governance, business resilience, and competitive survival.Time Stamps00:49 — Episode framing and the persistence of access control failures03:15 — Why passwords remain fundamentally broken05:54 — Enterprise vs. consumer passwordless realities09:25 — SolarWinds breach lessons and access control failures17:52 — Zero trust explained without the buzzwords23:07 — Device identity, IoT risk, and network visibility28:02 — Why identity and device controls must converge35:52 — How leaders should assess access control maturity42:52 — Designing security for human behavior43:30 — Closing reflectionsTo access and download the entire podcast summary with discussion highlights - https://www.dchatte.com/episode-99-access-control-reimagined-why-identity-devices-and-zero-trust-must-converge/Connect with Host Dr. Dave ChatterjeeLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dchatte/ Website: https://dchatte.com/Books PublishedThe DeepFake ConspiracyCybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and High-Performance ApproachArticles PublishedRamasastry, C. and Chatterjee, D. (2025). Trusona: Recruiting For The Hacker Mindset, Ivey Publishing, Oct 3, 2025.Chatterjee, D. and Leslie, A. (2024). “Ignorance is not bliss: A human-centered whole-of-enterprise approach to cybersecurity preparedness,” Business Horizons,

SolarWinds TechPod returns with its annual IT trends and predictions episode — and 2026 is all about Agentic AI. In this episode of SolarWinds TechPod, hosts Sean Sebring and Chrystal Taylor are joined by Sascha Giese (SolarWinds) and Lauren Okruch (SolarWinds Product Marketing) to break down how AI, ITSM, automation, governance, and resilience will shape IT operations in 2026. As a leader in IT management, observability, and IT service management, SolarWinds offers a unique perspective on how Agentic AI is moving IT from automation to autonomous action — and what that means for governance, security, and the evolving role of IT teams. Topics covered in this SolarWinds TechPod episode: What Agentic AI means for modern IT organizations How SolarWinds sees AI evolving beyond traditional automation The rise of shadow AI and shadow IT in enterprise environments Why IT governance and trust are critical in 2026 How ITSM is changing with AI-driven workflows Energy, sustainability, and cost considerations of AI at scale Resilience, multi-cloud strategies, and right-compute decision making Why IT is no longer just a cost center — but an innovation engine This episode is essential listening for SolarWinds users, IT leaders, sysadmins, service desk teams, and technology decision-makers preparing for the next era of AI-powered IT operations. Subscribe to SolarWinds TechPod for expert insights on ITSM, observability, AI in IT, automation, and digital transformation — straight from the SolarWinds community.

Welcome in! You've entered, Only Malware in the Building. Join us each month to sip tea and solve mysteries about today's most interesting threats. Your host is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Selena Larson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Proofpoint⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ intelligence analyst and host of their podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠DISCARDED⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Inspired by the residents of a building in New York's exclusive upper west side, Selena is joined by her co-hosts ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠N2K Networks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dave Bittner⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Keith Mularski⁠⁠⁠⁠, former FBI cybercrime investigator and now Chief Global Ambassador at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Qintel⁠⁠⁠⁠. Being a security researcher is a bit like being a detective: you gather clues, analyze the evidence, and consult the experts to solve the cyber puzzle. On this episode, we dive into supply chain attacks through the lens of a massive Android malware campaign that infects devices before they ever reach users, embedding itself in firmware and reseller-installed system images. We connect the dots to other high-impact supply chain incidents—from SolarWinds to the recent F5 breach—and share new intelligence on Android devices compromised during manufacturing and distribution in China. Together, these cases highlight how attacks at the source can quietly scale, persist, and evade traditional defenses.

Welcome in! You've entered, Only Malware in the Building. Join us each month to sip tea and solve mysteries about today's most interesting threats. Your host is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Selena Larson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Proofpoint⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ intelligence analyst and host of their podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠DISCARDED⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Inspired by the residents of a building in New York's exclusive upper west side, Selena is joined by her co-hosts ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠N2K Networks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dave Bittner⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Keith Mularski⁠⁠⁠⁠, former FBI cybercrime investigator and now Chief Global Ambassador at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Qintel⁠⁠⁠⁠. Being a security researcher is a bit like being a detective: you gather clues, analyze the evidence, and consult the experts to solve the cyber puzzle. On this episode, we dive into supply chain attacks through the lens of a massive Android malware campaign that infects devices before they ever reach users, embedding itself in firmware and reseller-installed system images. We connect the dots to other high-impact supply chain incidents—from SolarWinds to the recent F5 breach—and share new intelligence on Android devices compromised during manufacturing and distribution in China. Together, these cases highlight how attacks at the source can quietly scale, persist, and evade traditional defenses.

The holiday season is in full swing, and as retailers vie for consumer dollars, some of the biggest ones are branching out to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. In this episode, we describe what that experience looks like now and what brands should do in response. We also look at the lasting implications of a high-profile legal case for CISOs and the state of AI in B2B sales.

In this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's cybersecurity news, including: Salesforce partner Gainsight has customer data stolen Crowdstrike fires insider who gave hackers screenshots of internal systems Australian Parliament turns off wifi and bluetooth in fear of of visiting Chinese bigwigs Shai-Hulud npm/Github worm is back, and rm -rf'ier than ever SEC gives up on Solarwinds lawsuit Dog eats cryptographer's key material This week's episode is sponsored by runZero. HD Moore pops in to talk about how they're integrating runZero with Bloodhound-style graph databases. He also discusses uses for driving runZero's tools with an AI, plus the complexities of shipping AI when the company has a variety of deployment models. This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes Google says hackers stole data from 200 companies following Gainsight breach Gainsight Status Trust Status CrowdStrike fires 'suspicious insider' who passed information to hackers Salesforce cuts off access to third-party app after discovering ‘unusual activity' Атаки разящей панды: APT31 сегодня Office of Public Affairs | Seven Hackers Associated with Chinese Government Charged with Computer Intrusions Australian federal MPs warned to turn off phones when Chinese delegation visits Parliament House Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming of the NPM Worm is Digging For Secrets FCC eliminates cybersecurity requirements for telecom companies Trade Associations Cybersecurity Practices Ex Parte SEC voluntarily dismisses SolarWinds lawsuit Record-breaking DDoS attack against Microsoft Azure mitigated The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap – Krebs on Security Critics scoff after Microsoft warns AI feature can infect machines and pilfer data vx-underground on X: "I've had a surprising amount of people ask me about Copilot" Researchers warn command injection flaw in Fortinet FortiWeb is under exploitation Two suspected Scattered Spider hackers plead not guilty over Transport for London cyberattack Russia arrests young cybersecurity entrepreneur on treason charges This campaign aims to tackle persistent security myths in favor of better advice Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key. Uncovering network attack paths with runZeroHound Model Context Protocol

In this episode, host David Shipley discusses some of the most pressing issues in cybersecurity today. Checkout.com refuses to pay a ransom to cyber extortion group Shiny Hunters and instead donates to cybersecurity research. The U.S. SEC ends its long-standing case against SolarWinds and their CISO Tim Brown, highlighting ongoing debates about cybersecurity accountability. Additionally, the FCC reverses cybersecurity mandates originally set after the Salt Typhoon hacks, drawing criticism and raising questions about national security preparedness. The episode emphasizes the critical role of policy and regulation in affecting cybersecurity outcomes and encourages the tech community to participate actively in shaping better laws and frameworks. Cybersecurity Today would like to thank Meter for their support in bringing you this podcast. Meter delivers a complete networking stack, wired, wireless and cellular in one integrated solution that's built for performance and scale. You can find them at Meter.com/cst   00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message 00:51 Checkout.com Refuses Ransom and Supports Cyber Research 04:10 SEC Ends Case Against SolarWinds and CISO 08:36 FCC Reverses Cybersecurity Mandates 12:22 The Importance of Policy in Cybersecurity 14:42 Conclusion and Call to Action

Plus: Pony AI will gain global momentum, say analysts. And the SEC drops its landmark cyber case against SolarWinds. Julie Chang hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cyber Command names a new head of AI. The UK introduces its long-delayed Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. Researchers highlight a critical Oracle Identity Manager flaw. Salesforce warns customers of a third-party data breach. Italy's state-owned railway operator leaks sensitive information. SonicWall patches firewalls and email security devices. The US charges four individuals with conspiring to illegally export restricted Nvidia AI chips to China. The SEC drops its lawsuit against SolarWinds. NSO group claims a permanent injunction could cause irreparable and potentially existential harm. Maria Varmazis of the T-Minus Space Daily show sits down with General Daniel Karbler (Ret.) to discuss his consulting work for A House of Dynamite, the newly released Netflix film. Roses are red, violets are blue, this poem just jailbroke your AI too. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Maria Varmazis of the T-Minus Space Daily show sits down with Lt. General Daniel Karbler (Ret.) to discuss his consulting work for A House of Dynamite, the newly released Netflix film. This is an excerpt of T-Minus Deep Space airing tomorrow in all of your favorite podcast app. Selected Reading Cyber Command Taps Reid Novotny as New AI Chief (MeriTalk) UK's New Cybersecurity Bill Takes Aim at Ransomware Gangs and State-Backed Hackers (Fortra) Critical Oracle Identity Manager Flaw Possibly Exploited as Zero-Day (SecurityWeek) Salesforce alerts customers of data breach traced to a supply chain partner (CXOtoday) Massive data leak hits Italian railway operator Ferrovie dello Stato via Almaviva hack (Security Affairs) SonicWall Patches High-Severity Flaws in Firewalls, Email Security Appliance (SecurityWeek) Four charged with plotting to sneak Nvidia chips into China (The Register) SEC voluntarily dismisses SolarWinds lawsuit (The Record) NSO Group argues WhatsApp injunction threatens existence, future U.S. government work (CyberScoop) Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models (Arxiv) Freesound Music Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Great Women in Compliance, co-host Dr. Hemma Lomax welcomes Shannon Ralich, Vice President of Compliance and Chief Privacy Officer at Machinify, to discuss the evolving landscape of data privacy, cybersecurity, and responsible AI. Shannon shares her remarkable journey from a curious child taking apart electronics to a seasoned leader blending technology, law, and strategy. She offers insight into how curiosity and creativity can fuel governance excellence and explains what it means to design systems that anticipate risk and enable responsible innovation. Together, Hemma and Shannon explore: How privacy and cybersecurity intersect in today's fast-evolving AI environment The most pressing compliance challenges around data governance and global regulation Lessons from the SolarWinds and Uber cases and the growing conversation around individual accountability for CISOs and compliance leaders Practical steps for staying agile—through reliable news sources, cross-functional camaraderie, and professional networks How to translate corporate compliance skills into meaningful community impact through nonprofit leadership and animal rescue advocacy Shannon's message is a powerful reminder that the best leaders bring their full selves to the work: technical precision, ethical clarity, and human compassion. Biography: Shannon Ralich is the Vice President of Compliance and Chief Privacy Officer at Machinify, a healthcare intelligence company applying AI to improve the efficiency and integrity of healthcare payments. With more than 20 years of experience across legal, compliance, privacy, and cybersecurity roles, Shannon specializes in aligning governance frameworks with business innovation. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Privacy Bar Section of the IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals). She is widely respected for her strategic, forward-thinking approach to data protection and responsible AI governance. Beyond her professional expertise, Shannon is a passionate advocate for animal welfare. She sits on the Board of Directors for the Neuse River Golden Retriever Rescue, where she leverages her operational and technological skills to strengthen fundraising, improve systems, and support global rescue missions. A lifelong learner and self-described “builder,” Shannon finds creativity and grounding through woodworking, outdoor adventures with her family, and contributing to causes that make both workplaces and communities more humane. Note: The views expressed in this podcast are our own and do not represent the views of our employers, nor should they be taken as legal advice in any circumstances. 

Distracting the Analyst for Fun and Profit Our undergraduate intern, Tyler House analyzed what may have been a small DoS attack that was likely more meant to distract than to actually cause a denial of service https://isc.sans.edu/diary/%5BGuest%20Diary%5D%20Distracting%20the%20Analyst%20for%20Fun%20and%20Profit/32308 GitHub s plan for a more secure npm supply chain GitHub outlined its plan to harden the supply chain, in particular in light of the recent attack against npm packages https://github.blog/security/supply-chain-security/our-plan-for-a-more-secure-npm-supply-chain/ SolarWinds Web Help Desk AjaxProxy Deserialization of Untrusted Data Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2025-26399) SolarWinds Web Help Desk was found to be susceptible to an unauthenticated AjaxProxy deserialization remote code execution vulnerability that, if exploited, would allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine. This vulnerability is a patch bypass of CVE-2024-28988, which in turn is a patch bypass of CVE-2024-28986. https://www.solarwinds.com/trust-center/security-advisories/cve-2025-26399 Vulnerabilities in Supermicro BMC Firmware CVE-2025-7937 CVE-2025-6198 Supermicro fixed two vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to compromise the BMC with rogue firmware. https://www.supermicro.com/en/support/security_BMC_IPMI_Sept_2025