Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) underpins nearly every secure interaction in modern IT, but it's also one of the most misunderstood and overlooked foundations of security.

In this episode of Secure IT, host Jason Kikta is joined by Mark Cooper, CEO and founder of PKI Solutions, to unpack why PKI is so critical to identity, authentication, and trust, and what happens when it fails.

They explore how certificates enable passwordless authentication, secure TLS connections, IoT devices, endpoints, and enterprise systems, while also examining why misconfigured or poorly monitored PKI environments often become an attacker's fastest path to privilege escalation. From certificate expirations and operational outages to real-world breach scenarios and pen test failures, this conversation maps the full PKI risk spectrum.

Jason and Mark also challenge a common assumption in cybersecurity: that recovery equals resilience. Instead, they argue that true resilience means staying secure and operational, even during misconfiguration, failure, or attack.

Whether you're new to PKI or responsible for running it, this episode will change how you think about identity infrastructure, resilience, and trust.

Topics covered:

- What PKI is and why most organizations already depend on it
- Certificates, passwordless authentication, and digital identity
- How PKI misconfigurations enable high-impact attacks
- Why recovery is the weakest form of resilience
- The hidden operational and security risks of foundational systems

570 vulnerabilities. That's July's Patch Tuesday count, nearly triple last month and a record by a wide margin.

 Jason Kikta is joined by host Landon Miles and offensive-security researcher Serena DiPenti for the July 2026 rundown:

• An Active Directory Federation Services bug (CVE-2026-56155) already exploited in the wild, rated a deceptively low 7.8
• A 9.8 DHCP client flaw (CVE-2026-49181) that reaches every Windows endpoint on the network
• An RDP bug you can shut down with a single setting, no patch required
• A SharePoint deserialization flaw (CVE-2026-50522) reachable by anyone with site-owner access
• A 9.9 Hyper-V escape that lets one compromised VM take the whole host
• A BitLocker bypass (6.1) worth knowing if you manage laptops in the field

Plus why hacker summer camp turns every July into a bug dump, and what a 570-CVE release says about how much AI is really driving vulnerability discovery.

Eighteen months after the Hands-On IT podcast tackled the state of IT careers, Chelsea Rickey, SVP of Human Resources at Automox, comes back to the conversation to assess what held up, what changed, and what nobody quite predicted.

AI is no longer a future-state problem. It's already reshaping what roles look like, how productivity gets measured, and how organizations coordinate. Individual learning agility still matters, but Chelsea argues the harder question now is whether organizations can adapt as fast as the people inside them.

CISA's BOD 26-04 replaces severity-based patching with an exploit-evidence model and remediation clocks as short as three days, fleet-wide, no exceptions. Peter Pflaster and Jason Kikta unpack the four urgency signals, the 16-row decision tree, and the shift from "justify the patch" to "justify why you can't." They also cover what it means for contractors, cyber insurance, and the future of Patch Tuesday. 

If you own patching or vulnerability management, start here.

June 2026 has no headliner. Instead of one critical bug, the release spreads thin across the kernel, the network stack, a code editor, an AI assistant, a bootloader, and a nine-year-old Linux root bug. It's a breadth problem, not a severity one, and it changes how you triage.

Jason Kikta and Landon Miles break down the whole release, then step off the patch list for the breaches that never got a CVE: GitHub's internal repos reached through a poisoned VS Code extension, a TanStack compromise carrying valid SLSA provenance, and a Red Hat npm namespace compromise that fired the moment anyone ran npm install.

The May 2026 Microsoft Patch Tuesday release looks quiet on the surface – no actively exploited zero-days, no public disclosures at release, and a CVE count below the four-month average. Don't let that fool you.

In this episode, Jason Kikta and Landon Miles break down everything that happened between April and May patch cycles, including Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.5 release with 79 CVEs, the Dirty Frag Linux kernel privilege escalation chain, and two pre-authenticated network remote code execution vulnerabilities in Windows core services that belong at the top of your patch list.

They also dig into one of the month's most significant trends: AI-assisted vulnerability research showing up by name in Microsoft, Apple, and Linux acknowledgments in the same patch cycle – including Anthropic researchers credited on a critical Windows graphics component RCE. Ten AI-attributed vulnerability discoveries shipped fixes across all three major operating systems this month.

What's covered:

• CVE-2026-41089: Windows NetLogon RCE (CVSS 9.8) and CVE-2026-41096: Windows DNS Client RCE (CVSS 9.8)
• CVE-2026-40402: Hyper-V guest-to-host escalation (CVSS 9.3)
• macOS Tahoe 26.5: Wi-Fi kernel RCE, nine kernel CVEs, 20 WebKit vulnerabilities
• Dirty Frag Linux privilege escalation chain and the Copy Fail connection
• AI-credited discoveries from Anthropic, calif.io, Theori, and NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation

- Patch Tuesday Blog
- DirtyFrag Blog
- What "Mythos Ready" Means

Breaking from the normal Patch Tuesday cadence for an emergency drop. On May 7, security researcher Hyunwoo Kim published a working proof-of-concept for DirtyFrag - a Linux kernel local privilege escalation chain that gets unprivileged users to root on every major distribution. The embargo was broken by a third party before distribution backports were ready, so the exploit is public and the patch is not.

CTO Jason Kikta and Landon Miles walk through what makes DirtyFrag different from the Copy Fail mitigation many teams already deployed (spoiler: the CopyFail mitigation does NOT cover this), why AWS is calling it a class rather than a single CVE, and the five kernel modules you need to block right now: esp4, esp6, ipcomp4, ipcomp6, and rxrpc.

In this episode:

• Why the embargo break matters and what changed on May 7
• How DirtyFrag chains CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 to defeat both Ubuntu's namespace policy and the absence of rxrpc.ko on other distros
• Why this is the third generation of a bug class (DirtyPipe → Copy Fail → DirtyFrag) and what that means for what comes next
• The Automox Worklet that mitigates both arms across your Linux fleet, and what it deliberately does not do
• Tested affected platforms: Ubuntu 24.04, RHEL 10.1, AlmaLinux 10, CentOS Stream 10, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora 44

Back to the regular Patch Tuesday schedule next week.

Links:

• Full blog post and mitigation guidance 
• Automox Worklet (in-console for customers): 
• Worklet source on GitHub
• Hyunwoo Kim's PoC and write-up
• AWS Security Bulletin 2026-027
• CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail, parent issue)

In this episode of Autonomous IT, Live!, we break down the widening gap between exploitation speed and remediation reality. Disclosed vulnerabilities keep climbing, exploitation windows keep shrinking, and IT and security teams are expected to absorb more risk without more resources. The traditional playbook — manual patching, fragmented workflows, scheduled cycles — was built for a slower world that no longer exists.

What you'll learn:

• Why threat actors consistently outpace defender response times
• Where manual patching and fragmented processes break down, even for mature teams
• How rising vulnerability volume and shrinking exploitation timelines are reshaping risk
• Why working harder isn't the answer — and what actually needs to change

Who should listen: IT and security leaders responsible for vulnerability management, infrastructure teams running distributed or SaaS-heavy environments, and anyone focused on shrinking exposure windows and accelerating response.

The gap between attacker speed and defender capability isn't closing on its own. This conversation is about what it takes to close it.

This live show originally aired April 22, 2026. 

Claude Mythos dominated the AI security conversation for two weeks straight, from the Cloud Security Alliance's strategy briefing to sharp public skepticism to yesterday's Bloomberg report that unauthorized users on Discord have been accessing Mythos since its limited launch. Host Jason Kikta cuts through the noise to separate the contested vendor claims from the established trend.

In this episode:

• Why the Mythos debate misses the point, and the independently verified AI security milestones that predate it (XBOW topping HackerOne, DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge, Google Big Sleep, Claude Opus 4.6's 500+ high-severity findings)
• A careful look at the numbers behind Anthropic's system card, including the Firefox exploit rate dropping from 72.4% to 4.4% once pre-discovered bugs are removed
• The CSA's top CISO recommendations that hold regardless of which Mythos claims you believe: patching, segmentation, egress filtering, MFA, defense in depth
• Three concrete actions to take this week, including the governance conversation most security leaders are overdue to have with the business

Good security starts with good IT. The trend is stable. The claims are contested. Anchor your planning accordingly.

Links and sources:

• CSA briefing
• Project Glasswing
• Mythos technical writeup
• Ottenheimer system card teardown
• Tom's Hardware on the 198 manual reviews: 
• Bloomberg on the Discord leak

This month's Patch Tuesday drops a SQL Server elevation of privilege that hands attackers sysadmin access and an actively exploited SharePoint XSS flaw that requires no authentication. 

SQL injection in the database engine. Cross-site scripting. In 2026...? 

Ryan and Mat break down how these attacks work, what to watch for, and why these "classic" vulnerability classes refuse to stay dead.                

Also covered: 80 Edge and Chromium fixes released this month, and a recurring reminder about Secure Boot certificates you can't afford to ignore this year.

In this episode of IT Insiders, Maddie Regis speaks with Emily Pace, a Senior Product Manager at Automox. Emily shares her career journey, her role in product management, and the collaborative environment at Automox that fosters innovation. They discuss current projects, the importance of customer feedback, and Emily's advice for IT professionals. The conversation concludes with a fun game about real and fake products, showcasing Emily's quick thinking and humor.

This episode originally aired November 19, 2024