When Cybercrime Gets Personal
Easy Prey
Most security breaches don't begin with sophisticated code or elaborate technical exploits. They begin with a phone call, a convincing email, or someone at a help desk who just wanted to be helpful. The human layer is often the weakest link, and the criminals who understand that are the ones causing the most damage. My guest today is May Chen-Contino. She's the CEO of Unit 221B, a threat disruption company that delivers actionable intelligence to enterprises, law enforcement, and government agencies. Her background spans cybersecurity, fintech, and SaaS leadership at companies like PayPal and...
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Stopping Phone Scams
Easy Prey
Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, automation, and staggering profitability. My guest today is Alex Quilici. He’s an engineer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of YouMail, a company focused on protecting consumers and businesses from unwanted and fraudulent calls. Alex has spent years analyzing how robocalls and scam campaigns are designed, how they evolve, and why they continue to work despite better technology and increased awareness. What...
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Stolen Identity - Stolen Peace
Easy Prey
Identity theft gets talked about a lot, but usually in the abstract: freeze your credit, watch your statements, don't click suspicious links. What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is what it actually feels like when someone isn't just using your card number, but is actively living as you. My guest today is Brooklyn Lyons. She's 25, recently married, and by her own admission, had no particular expertise in fraud or cybersecurity before October of 2024. That changed when her car window was smashed in a parking lot, and her work bag, laptop, wallet, driver's license, and everything...
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Inside Modern Fraud
Easy Prey
Fraud doesn’t always announce itself with obvious warning signs. Quite often, it shows up wrapped inside something that feels routine — a purchase you’ve made before, a link that looks legitimate, a message that arrives at just the wrong moment. Nothing feels suspicious, so your guard stays down. By the time questions start forming, the transaction is already done. My guest today is Iremar Brayner. He’s spent more than 15 years working in fraud prevention and risk management across payments, retail, ride-hailing, fintech, and digital marketplaces. In his role at G2A, he leads fraud...
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Money Laundering
Easy Prey
Organized crime is often imagined as something violent, chaotic, and obvious. But today, it looks far more polished than that. It operates like a multinational business, spread across borders, built on trust networks, specialization, and efficiency rather than brute force. This episode looks at how modern scams, fraud, and money laundering actually work and why they’re so hard to spot before serious damage is done. My guest is Geoff White, an investigative journalist who has spent decades covering organized crime, cybercrime, and financial fraud. His reporting has appeared on BBC News, Sky...
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Critical Infrastructure Risks
Easy Prey
Most cybersecurity conversations focus on stolen data, breached accounts, and attacks that live entirely on screens. This episode looks at a far more consequential threat: what happens when cyberattacks target the physical systems that keep society running. Power, water, transportation, and manufacturing. When those systems fail, the consequences aren’t just digital. They’re immediate, visible, and sometimes dangerous. My guest is Lesley Carhart, Technical Director of Incident Response at Dragos, a cybersecurity firm focused exclusively on protecting critical infrastructure. Lesley...
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Familial Identity Theft
Easy Prey
Identity theft is usually framed as an external threat. Hackers, data breaches, anonymous criminals operating somewhere far away. This episode looks at a much harder reality to face: identity theft that happens inside families, often quietly, over many years, and without immediate detection. The damage isn’t just financial. It reshapes trust, relationships, and a person’s sense of stability long before anyone realizes what’s happening. My guest is Axton Betz-Hamilton, an associate professor of financial counseling and planning whose research focuses on familial and child identity theft....
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Exploiting Trust (Part 2)
Easy Prey
Security failures rarely come from cutting-edge attacks or sophisticated tools. They happen in ordinary moments when someone holds a door, follows an instruction without questioning it, or finds a workaround that makes their day easier. Those small, human decisions are often the real entry points, and they tend to compound over time. This episode picks up the second half of our conversation on exploiting trust with FC Barker, a veteran ethical hacker and physical security expert known for legally breaking into banks, government buildings, and high-security facilities around the world. With...
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Exploiting Trust (Part 1)
Easy Prey
Most security failures don’t start with a dramatic breach or a mysterious hacker sitting in a dark room. They usually start quietly. Someone assumes a system is locked down. Someone trusts that a door shouldn’t open, or that a machine “just works,” or that no one would ever think to look there. Over time, those small assumptions stack up, and that’s where things tend to go wrong. Today’s guest is FC Barker, a renowned ethical hacker, social engineer, and global keynote speaker with more than three decades of experience legally breaking into organizations to expose their blind...
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Surviving a Ransomware Attack
Easy Prey
A ransomware attack doesn’t always announce itself with flashing warnings and locked screens. Sometimes it starts with a quiet system outage, a few unavailable servers, and a sinking realization days later that the threat actors were already inside. This conversation pulls back the curtain on what really happens when an organization believes it’s dealing with routine failures only to discover it’s facing a full-scale cyber extortion event. My guest today is Zachary Lewis, CIO and CISO for a Midwest university, a 40 Under 40 Business Leader, and a former Nonprofit CISO of the Year....
info_outlineThe CDC states that since the Covid-19 pandemic began, one in every three children has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder such as anxiety or ADHD. It is more important than ever to learn how and to teach techniques to help reduce stress and anxiety.
Today’s guest is Dr. Michele Borba. Dr. Borba is an internationally renowned educator and award-winning author of 24 books. She is a motivational speaker having spoken in 19 countries on 5 continents and has served as a consultant to hundreds of schools and corporations like Sesame Street, Harvard, The US Air Force Academy, and the Royal Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Dr. Borba is an NBC contributor who has been on countless shows including Today, Dateline, Dr. Oz, Anderson Cooper, CNN, and more. Her work is featured in Time, Washington Post, Newsweek, Boston Globe, US News and World Report, and many others.
Show Notes:
- [1:30] - Dr. Borba started her career as a special education teacher and has learned how resilient kids truly are.
- [4:03] - We can’t point the finger at one specific cause. We need to focus on what to do about it.
- [5:07] - Dr. Borba describes a study done over the course of 40 years.
- [6:25] - What are the things we need to teach to help manage anxiety or prevent it?
- [8:35] - Connect with teachers. Kids act differently at school than they do at home.
- [9:33] - Teachers see trends in behaviors in their class.
- [10:16] - A major change in society is that getting mental health services is more acceptable.
- [11:23] - Give kids a range of ideas to help your children.
- [13:12] - When you suggest a hobby, it isn’t a sport or activity that you have to add to the agenda. It is something they choose to do.
- [14:37] - Hobbies, pets, music, etc. can be tools that work for some kids.
- [15:29] - Everyone has a different stress sign.
- [16:18] - Dr. Borba shares a breathing technique great for both kids and adults.
- [18:21] - By learning these strategies, kids can build muscle memory.
- [20:21] - Thrivers have the tools to pull from to deal with stress.
- [21:44] - Your voice and family mantra can become your child’s inner voice.
- [23:00] - Volunteering helps build hope and empathy.
- [25:03] - There are many ways to build empathy but be intentional.
- [26:34] - Teach emotional literacy.
- [27:50] - Many social skills are in dormant mode right now.
- [29:03] - Kids can also feed off the stress of their parents.
- [30:18] - Our society tends to focus on performance which can add levels of stress.
- [33:32] - Kids are becoming ruder and civility needs to be retaught.
- [36:10] - Empathy is a super power and is the glue that holds society together.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.