Hey friends! After last week's heavy episode about my wife's health scare in Punta Cana, today's is a lighter one. (Quick update: she's doing better – still recovering, but appetite's back and she's got some pep again. Thanks so much to everyone who sent kind messages.)

Today I'm gushing about how AI has been making my IT and security life way more efficient:

• Firewall migration: Had AI walk me through a WatchGuard T15W → T25W migration (no clean config export path). AI captured everything – screenshots, branch office VPN, VLANs, firewall rules, DHCP reservations – all organized and replayed step-by-step. The whole project took ~1 hr 15 min (plus 30 min hunting down a subnet typo that was 100% my fault).
• GOAD lab automation: Worked with AI to build a script that handles the full lifecycle of my Light Pentest GOAD student lab – tear it down, rebuild from latest, assign Tommy Boy-themed passwords and sync user accounts to the Apache Guacamole and lab connections. Speaking of which – Light Pentest GOAD class will be re-offered soon once the calendar firms up!
• External pentest wrapper scripts: Finally automated the boring auxiliary testing stuff – nmap, Shodan API, Nessus queuing, subdomain hijacking checks, metadata searches, cred spraying against M365, sysleaks lookups – all correlated and deduplicated into one push-button menu.
• SysReptor automation: If you're not using SysReptor for reporting, check it out. Piping JSON findings straight into reports via API as I test has been a game-changer. A webinar on this might be in 7MinSec's future.

Got cool ways you're using AI for IT/security work? We'd love to hear them!

Hello friends! Today's episode is a bit of a detour from our usual content — it's part vacation horror story, part security/privacy confession. My wife got seriously ill during our spring break trip to Punta Cana, and in the chaos of navigating a foreign hospital at 2 a.m. with zero sleep and a pile of Spanish medical documents, I threw every privacy best practice I've ever preached straight into the ocean. Here's what we cover:

• How a dream all-inclusive resort trip turned into an ambulance ride and a 3-day hospital stay faster than you can say "gastroenteritis"
• Why I uploaded my wife's full medical history, labs, and medication records to AI — unredacted (with no regrets)
• How AI helped me translate docs, track lab trends, brief stateside nurses, and build a full medication schedule with phone reminders (helpful considering the hospital staff's answer to everything was "sorry, no English")
• The absolute legend named Luis who got us through Punta Cana airport security in 15 minutes flat
• Why if you're ever the person back home receiving updates about a medical emergency overseas, Google is not your friend
• My honest security take: sometimes the right risk-based decision is to breach yourself

Today is my favorite pentest pwnage tale of 2026 – and maybe ever! It centers around an ADCS abuse via an attack path I'd never seen before. Tips include:

• Use Netexec to pull Powershell history
• Trying to steal reg hives and the EDR is made? Try copying them out to \\some-other-server.domain.com\share
• This post featured interesting use of the Responder -N option

Hola friends! Today's another fun tale of pentest pwnage. This time we started with no credentials and then set off on the bumpy journey from no-cred zero to domain admin hero! One specific reference in today's podcast that may be helpful to you is setting up ntlmrelayx to listen on port 3128.

Hello friends! We're back with a fun tale of internal network pentest pwnage. This one highlights how AI can be used (with some guardrails!) to automate the boring stuff – and even help you pick part DLLs to find gold nuggets!

P.S. – I do recommend you check out our last three episodes that are all about securing your community, and please check out this Rolling Stone article which will give you a full picture of what has been going on in Minnesota as it relates to the occupation of ICE agents.

Hello friends, in today's edition of How to Secure Your Community, I give a brief recap of part 1 and part 2, and then dive into some cool phone shortcuts you can setup so that with a single tap, you can alert friends/family that you're having an encounter with law enforcement and may need an assist. Here's the things/links discussed:

• This great Rolling Stone article which features interviews and first-hand stories of ICE encounters here in Minnesota
• Fashlight.org page on security and privacy, which features some cool shortcuts you can setup on iPhone to alert friends/family that you're having a negative encounter with law enforcement (or anyone else)
• How I allegedly stole somebody's quesadilla while I was at the movie theater seeing Scream 7
• The one time my wife had an outburst in the middle of a church service

Hello friends. Today's episode piggybacks off of last week's discussion of Operation Metro Surge and how it has affected the state of Minnesota. I also highly encourage you to read this Rolling Stone article which features interviews and first-hand stories of ICE encounters. And for those of you asking for a good org to support here in Minnesota, please support Haven Watch. They give rides/food to people who are detained by ICE and then cut loose – often without their jackets or phones – into the cold of winter with no ride home.

Today I pivot more into the technical weeds and offer some tips on:

• Securing your Signal app config
• Hardening your iPhone config via lockdown mode

Hello friends, it's good to be back with you. I took a podcast hiatus in January to focus on helping communities affected by Operation Metro Surge. Today I share how my family and community has been affected by it. And then in future episodes of this series, I'll get more into some technical nuts and bolts on how to be a more secure community helper – such as tightening up security settings on apps you use, "hardening" your phone, increasing your personal security/privacy posture, and more.