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....
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Why You Fall For Scams
Easy Prey
Why do smart, capable people fall for scams even when the warning signs seem obvious in hindsight? In this episode, Dan Ariely joins us to examine how intuition often leads us in the wrong direction, especially under stress, uncertainty, or emotional pressure. A renowned behavioral economist, longtime professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, Misbehaving, and Misbelief, Dan has spent decades studying why rational people consistently make choices that don’t serve them. We talk about...
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Mobile Device Threats
Easy Prey
In a world where we’re told to carry our entire lives in our pockets, we’ve reached a strange tipping point where the very devices meant to connect us have become windows into our private lives for those who wish us harm. It’s no longer a matter of looking for the "shady" corners of the internet; today, the threats come from nation-state actors, advanced AI, and even the people we think we’re hiring. We are living in an era where the most sophisticated hackers aren't just trying to break into your phone, they’re trying to move into your business by pretending to be your best...
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Past, Present, and Future of AI agents
Easy Prey
The intersection of AI and cybersecurity is changing faster than anyone expected, and that pace is creating both incredible innovation and brand-new risks we’re only beginning to understand. From deepfake ads that fool even seasoned security professionals to autonomous agents capable of acting on our behalf, the threat landscape looks very different than it did even a year ago. To explore what this evolution means for everyday people and for enterprises trying to keep up, I’m joined by Chris Kirschke, Field CISO at Tuskira and a security leader with more than two decades of experience...
info_outlineThe intersection of AI and cybersecurity is changing faster than anyone expected, and that pace is creating both incredible innovation and brand-new risks we’re only beginning to understand. From deepfake ads that fool even seasoned security professionals to autonomous agents capable of acting on our behalf, the threat landscape looks very different than it did even a year ago. To explore what this evolution means for everyday people and for enterprises trying to keep up, I’m joined by Chris Kirschke, Field CISO at Tuskira and a security leader with more than two decades of experience navigating complex cyber environments.
Chris talks about his unconventional path into the industry, how much harder it is for new professionals to enter cybersecurity today, and the surprising story of how he recently fell for a fake Facebook ad that showcased just how convincing AI-powered scams have become. He breaks down the four major waves of InfoSec from the rise of the web, through mobile and cloud, to the sudden, uncontrollable arrival of generative AI. He then explains why this fourth wave caught companies completely off guard. GenAI wasn’t something organizations adopted thoughtfully; it appeared overnight, with thousands of employees using it long before security teams understood its impact. That forced long-ignored issues like data classification, permissions cleanup, and internal hygiene to the forefront.
We also dive into the world of agentic AI which is AI that doesn’t just analyze but actually acts and the incredible opportunities and dangers that come with it. Chris shares how low-code orchestration, continuous penetration testing, context engineering, and security “mesh” architectures are reshaping modern InfoSec. Chris spends a lot of time talking about the human side of all this and why guardrails matter, how easy it is to over-automate, and the simple truth that AI still struggles with the soft skills security teams rely on every day. He also shares what companies should think about before diving into AI, starting with understanding their data, looping in legal and privacy teams early, and giving themselves room to experiment without turning everything over to an agent on day one.
Show Notes:
- [00:00] Chris Kirschke, Field CISO at Tuskira, is here to explore how AI is reshaping cybersecurity and why modern threats look so different today.
- [03:05] Chris shares his unexpected path from bartending into IT in the late ’90s, reflecting on how difficult it has become for newcomers to enter cybersecurity today.
- [06:18] A convincing Facebook scam slips past his defenses, illustrating how AI-enhanced fraud makes traditional red flags far harder to spot.
- [09:32] GenAI’s sudden arrival in the workplace creates chaos as employees adopt tools faster than security teams can assess risk.
- [12:08] The conversation shifts to AI-driven penetration testing and how continuous, automated testing is replacing traditional annual reports.
- [15:23] Agentic AI enters the picture as Chris explains how low-code orchestration and autonomous agents are transforming security workflows.
- [18:24] He discusses when consumers can safely rely on AI agents and why human-in-the-loop oversight remains essential for anything involving transactions or access.
- [21:48] AI’s dependence on context becomes clear as organizations move toward context lakes to support more intelligent, adaptive security models.
- [25:46] He highlights early experiments where AI agents automatically fix vulnerabilities in code, along with the dangers of developers becoming over-reliant on automation.
- [29:50] AI emerges as a support tool rather than a replacement, with Chris emphasizing that communication, trust, and human judgment remain central to the security profession.
- [33:35] A mock deposition experience reveals how AI might help individuals prepare for high-stress legal or compliance scenarios.
- [37:13] Chris outlines practical guardrails for adopting AI—starting with data understanding, legal partnerships, and clear architectural patterns.
- [40:21] Chatbot failures remind everyone that AI can invent policies or explanations when it lacks guidance, underscoring the need for strong oversight.
- [41:32] Closing thoughts include where to find more of Chris’s work and continue learning about Tuskira’s approach to AI security.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.