29 episodes listed below
PRESS PLAY
Joe Stocker, CEO of a Microsoft Cybersecurity consulting company, mentors his friend Larry on his journey to a career in Cybersecurity. Larry is a 49 year-old warehouse manager who has always wanted to get into the field of cybersecurity, but never had anyone to teach him the ropes. Larry asks tons of questions as Joe patiently explains key concepts and tells stories about his 20 year career in information technology.
Warehouse manager to SOC analyst: Larry asks Joe the career questions you keep reopening in tabs.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical discussion of MFA, cyber insurance, and tying security controls to financial protection.
The episode treats cyber risk as a business issue, not just a technical one, following Kirsten Bay, CEO and co-founder of SciSurance, through a discussion of warranty-backed insurance tied to verified security controls.
A grounded warning about voice-cloning panic, paired with a candid security-career conversation.
AI voice cloning feels alarmingly normal here: a call that sounds like a child in jail, a hostage story, and the pressure to act before anyone has checked what is true.
A carrier breach becomes a clear case for hardening identity before reused credentials get tested.
Cybersecurity 101 uses a mobile-carrier breach as a practical way into a bigger weakness: how online identity can depend on systems that were never meant to carry that much trust.
A practical cybersecurity origin story about turning one scrubbed intrusion into a wider invitation.
KC7 gives the episode its cleanest throughline: a cybersecurity competition starts as a way to learn from a scrubbed intrusion, then becomes a platform with about 9,200 registered users.
A grounded early-career cybersecurity conversation about Danny's new MSP role, technical nerves, and learning through practice.
Cybersecurity 101 with Joe and Larry follows Danny at a useful early-career moment: he has a Bachelor of Computer Science behind him and a new role at a managed service provider that also offers security services.
Technology's mechanisms, power's consequences.
Dave, Joe, and Maria break down phishing kits, deepfakes, and social-engineering scams weekly.
["Kirsten Bay says SciSurance ties warranty-backed insurance to verified controls inside Patriot's MXDR service.", "Her path runs through finance, intangible asset modeling, DHS supply-chain working groups, NIST frameworks, and intelligence analysis.", "The sharpest examples are AI voice replication after a few seconds of audio, MFA that is only partially deployed, and patching gaps on firewalls.", "The practical answer is severity reduction through immutable backups, log capture, data retention, and controls that can move a loss from catastrophic to a fender bender."]
Larry and Joe examine a breach involving AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and five unnamed mobile carriers that reportedly exposed wiretap systems and text messages.
Larry says AI can clone a child’s voice and make a caller sound like a kid in jail, so the safe move is to hang up and call back on the known number.
KC7 co-founders Simeon Kakpovi and Greg Schloemer explain how a Lockheed competition that arrived as an 80-gigabyte flash drive pushed Simeon toward cybersecurity.
Danny says cybersecurity is a mid-level career and that, after graduating in computer science, he spent about a year moving through sales, school-district IT work, and his own IT company before landing a junior system admin and IT technician role.
Larry describes reaching a full-time SOC analyst role at Patriot after two and a half years of study, warehouse work, and weekend shifts.
Cybersecurity 101 with Larry and Joe closes its 22-episode podcast run by moving future hands-on training to YouTube after starting in January 2020.
Larry describes completing the Certified Ethical Hacker course after a four-hour exam, while Joe explains why he wrote “Securing Microsoft 365.” Joe says the book focuses on email, identity, and device security because Microsoft 365 is used by over 90% of businesses and phishing remains a major access route.
Joe and Larry interview Pankaj Gupta of Citrix about why DDoS attacks remain common 25 years after the September 6, 1996 attack on Panix.
Larry updates Joe on his progress in cybersecurity school and preparing for the Security+ certification.
Joe and Larry interview Dimitri Thorpe about his 20-year IT career, starting from his Marine Corps background and early computer interest.
Joe and Larry interview cybersecurity veteran Bob Schlofeld about his career journey and insights.