When your identity data stops matching reality, every dashboard and control you rely on starts to wobble. In this audio edition of “Identity Bankruptcy: When Your Organization Runs Out of Trust,” we walk through what it looks like when a mature organization quietly runs out of confidence in its own answers to “who is this” and “what should they be able to do.” The episode unpacks identity debt, the idea of an “identity balance sheet,” and the ways mergers, SaaS sprawl, and rushed cloud programs corrode trust long before a breach hits the news. This narration is based on the Wednesday “Headline” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine.

You will hear a leader-focused walkthrough of the key sections of the article: how organizations drift into identity bankruptcy, what happens when trust signals stop making sense, and how to restructure the “identity economy” without stalling business transformation. We dig into practical leadership moves like setting identity “credit limits,” planning write-offs of legacy identity debt, and choosing a small set of metrics that actually describe identity health to boards and regulators. If you are responsible for risk, architecture, or trust at scale, this episode gives you language and mental models to challenge the state of identity in your own environment.

When a security alert fires, what really happens in those first few minutes? This narrated edition of our Tuesday “Insights” feature in Bare Metal Cyber Magazine walks through the real work of alert triage, from the moment a signal lands in the queue to the decision to close, monitor, investigate, or escalate. You will hear how triage fits into the wider security operations flow and why it acts as the front door to incident response rather than just another tool screen to stare at.

The episode also explores everyday use cases, quick wins for small or overworked teams, and deeper ways to use triage outcomes as data to tune detections and refine processes. Along the way, it highlights the genuine benefits of strong triage, the trade-offs and limits you should expect, and the failure modes that show up when alert handling slips into chaos. It is developed by Bare Metal Cyber to give you a grounded, vendor-neutral view of turning noisy alerts into clear security decisions.

This episode takes you inside the CompTIA Network+ (Network+) certification from an early-career point of view, focusing on what the credential actually means for people who live in and around day-to-day IT work. You will hear a clear walkthrough of what Network+ covers, the kinds of environments it is built for, and how it helps you move from basic support tasks toward understanding real infrastructure. We unpack what the exam really tests, how the domains translate into everyday scenarios, and the type of thinking that leads to better answers when you are faced with incomplete or confusing network symptoms. The narration is drawn from my Monday “Certified” feature in Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, so you are getting a structured, article-quality tour in audio form.

You will also hear how Network+ can shape your long-term roadmap, whether you want to become a network engineer, a systems administrator, or a cybersecurity professional who needs strong network fundamentals. We talk about where the certification usually fits in a broader path, how hiring managers tend to view it, and why combining it with hands-on practice is so powerful. Along the way, you will get practical guidance on building a simple, sustainable study plan and using everyday troubleshooting as prep. If you want to go beyond this overview, there is a full audio course for Network+ inside the Bare Metal Cyber Audio Academy that lets you keep learning during commutes, workouts, or any time you are away from the keyboard.

In this episode, we unpack how AI helpdesks and support copilots are quietly becoming a new social engineering surface. Instead of just worrying about phishing human agents, leaders now have to think about attackers shaping what the model believes, what it reveals, and which workflows it triggers. We walk through how these AI front doors are wired into ticketing, HR, and identity systems, why that turns them into privileged brokers, and where prompt injection, context hijacking, and over-helpful responses start to bend your trust boundaries. The narration is based on a Wednesday “Headline” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine.

From there, we move into the leadership decisions that will determine whether your copilot stays an asset or drifts toward becoming a co-conspirator. You will hear how deterministic policies collide with probabilistic model behavior, how the helpdesk trust contract needs to be rewritten for an AI-first front line, and what it means to design secure copilots from the start. We close by looking ahead at a world where attackers bring their own AI agents to probe your helpdesk at scale, and we offer a practical lens for constraining authority, improving observability, and keeping high-risk actions anchored in strong identity and human verification.

In this episode of Bare Metal Cyber’s Tuesday “Insights” feature, we unpack how security logs, events, and alerts can move from noisy fragments to a clear, trustworthy security story. You’ll hear a plain-language walkthrough of what each layer really is, where it fits across identity, network, endpoint, and cloud, and how they work together as a narrative pipeline. We follow a small end-to-end example so you can picture how scattered records turn into a coherent incident timeline instead of a pile of disconnected clues on a dashboard.

The narration, developed by Bare Metal Cyber from our Tuesday “Insights” feature in Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, also explores everyday use cases, from quick-win coverage around logins and admin changes to deeper applications in threat hunting and post-incident reviews. You’ll hear about the real benefits of treating your data as a story, the trade-offs in storage, tuning, and skills, and the failure modes that lead to alert fatigue and missing chapters. By the end, you’ll have a practical mental model you can apply the next time you open your SIEM or XDR console and need to explain “what actually happened” with confidence.

When you see “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner” on a resume, what does it really tell you about that person’s cloud skills? In this Monday “Certified” episode, we unpack the CCP as Amazon’s foundational cloud credential and look at what it actually proves for early-career tech and security professionals, as well as career changers trying to break into cloud. You’ll hear how CCP fits into the bigger AWS certification ladder, where its limits are, and why it has become a common gateway into cloud roles.

We also walk through what the exam really tests: high-level cloud concepts, core AWS services, shared responsibility for security, and how pricing and billing work in the real world. Along the way, you’ll get a practical study roadmap that fits around a full-time job, plus tips for using hands-on labs and practice questions without burning out. If cloud is on your roadmap and you want a structured, honest starting point, this conversation will help you decide whether CCP is worth your time and how to get the most value from it.

In this episode, we dig into what happens when your most important artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities come from models, copilots, and APIs you did not build yourself. Instead of debating algorithms, we follow the path leaders actually live with: opaque upstream providers, shifting model behavior, and sensitive data flowing through black boxes that now sit squarely in the middle of critical business processes. You will hear how model lineage, training data choices, and vendor change control quietly shape the risk your organization ends up owning.

We walk through the key sections of the Headline article: reframing accountability for external AI, mapping the real model supply chain behind “we just call an API,” examining concrete failure patterns, and turning vendor due diligence into questions about behavior rather than just infrastructure. From there, we explore how to wrap these external systems with your own guardrails, monitoring, and kill switches, and what a realistic operating model for AI supply chain risk looks like. This narration is based on Bare Metal Cyber Magazine’s Wednesday “Headline” feature, “Model Supply Chain Mayhem: Securing the AI You Didn’t Build Yourself.”

Security controls are often described as policies, tools, and processes, but in practice they shape how your defenses behave before, during, and after an incident. In this audio walkthrough, we break down the major types of controls in clear, practical terms: preventive controls that try to stop bad things from happening, detective controls that help you see what slipped through, corrective controls that support recovery, and supporting types like directive, deterrent, and compensating controls. You will hear how these categories span people, process, and technology, and why a balanced mix matters more than the sheer number of tools in your environment.

Across two short segments, the episode walks through what these control types are, where they fit in a typical security stack, how they work together in realistic scenarios, and what benefits and trade-offs each category brings. We also highlight common failure modes such as shallow adoption, lopsided focus on prevention, and “alert museum” monitoring, then contrast them with healthy signals like tested recovery steps and clear ownership. This narration is based on my Tuesday “Insights” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, so you get the same vendor-neutral, plain-language explanations in a format you can listen to on the move.