This is your weekly cyber news roll-up for the week ending December 5th, 2025. Holiday shopping dominates the threat landscape, with industrial scale fake Christmas and Cyber Monday stores siphoning card data while a massive breach at Korean retail giant Coupang exposes tens of millions of shoppers. At the same time, attackers are burrowing into the software factory, from exposed secrets in cloud code repositories and malicious developer packages to tainted browser extensions that quietly spy on everyday work in customer relationship, finance, and human resources tools. Law enforcement’s takedown of a major crypto mixer shows real pressure on ransomware cash washing, even as mobile devices and airport Wi Fi remind leaders how fragile everyday access can be.

Across the episode, you will hear how attackers exploit hurry, convenience, and shared platforms in very different settings, from North Korean software supply chain campaigns and steganography tools built for espionage, to vendor breaches at financial data providers and cross tenant flaws in cloud services. We explore how weak artificial intelligence governance and powerful low code workflows can be twisted into ransomware launchers, how fake ChatGPT style browsers steal passwords at scale, and why critical bugs in React based web stacks demand rapid attention from builders. Executives, security teams, engineers, and students all get practical context on where trust is eroding and which signals to watch in logs, workflows, and vendor relationships. This weekly roll-up is designed to help you decide what to act on first, and it is available at DailyCyber.news.

Excel is great for many things — but it is not a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platform. In this Cyber Talk developed by BareMetalCyber.com, Dr. Jason Edwards sits down with Dean Charlton, Managing Director of DC CyberTech, to unpack why even the most well-intentioned GRC programs stall out when they live in spreadsheets.

Dean walks through the real-world pain points of “Excel-driven” GRC, from version chaos and manual updates to audit gaps and poor visibility for leadership. He then shows how automated, AI-driven GRC solutions can support organizations of all sizes, giving you cleaner data, clearer accountability, and a living view of risk instead of static files.

If you’re still managing controls, risks, and audits in Excel — or you’re afraid a full-blown platform is “too big” for your team — this session will give you practical ways to think differently about tooling, scalability, and where AI can actually help.

In this episode, we pull back the curtain on Shadow SaaS—the hidden world of unsanctioned apps quietly multiplying across the enterprise. You’ll learn how a single “Sign in with Google” click can spawn a durable, invisible connection, why OAuth tokens never seem to die, and how browser extensions and plug-ins form entire shadow ecosystems. We trace the blast radius from data leaks to compliance failures, and show how discovery pipelines, technical guardrails, and smart workflows can expose the sprawl without slowing innovation.

By listening, you’ll sharpen your ability to spot the signs of Shadow SaaS in your own environment, build stronger instincts around risk-based discovery, and gain practical strategies for token management, data protection, and cultural alignment. You’ll walk away with skills to govern SaaS without becoming the “department of no,” turning hidden risk into managed resilience. This episode equips you to secure speed and innovation hand in hand.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This narrated Insight walks through the Cyber Kill Chain (CKC) and broader cyber attack lifecycle models as practical tools for real-world defenders. You’ll hear how CKC breaks an intrusion into recognizable stages, from reconnaissance to actions on objectives, and how that gives analysts and engineers a common storyline for messy, real-world incidents. The audio stays vendor-neutral and plain-language, focusing on how to connect alerts, logs, and behaviors to a clear sense of “where in the attacker’s journey are we right now?”

You’ll also explore everyday use cases, from tuning detections and building playbooks to running more realistic tabletops and making smarter architecture and budget decisions. Along the way, the episode examines benefits, trade-offs, and common failure modes, like treating the Cyber Kill Chain as a slideware checkbox instead of an operational lens. This narration is developed from the Tuesday “Insights” feature in Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, giving you a concise, audio-first way to absorb the full breakdown.

Step into the world of CompTIA Security+ (Security+) with this narrated guide designed for early-career technologists and career-changers. This episode explains what Security+ actually covers, who it is really for, and why so many entry-level security and IT roles call it out by name. You will hear how the exam objectives translate into real skills around threats, defenses, secure design, and day-to-day operations, all in clear, plain English. The narration is based on my Monday “Certified” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, adapted for audio so you can follow along without needing the article in front of you.

We also explore where Security+ fits in a broader certification and career path, from help desk and junior admin roles through security analyst and SOC positions. You will learn how the exam rewards applied understanding over flashcard memorization, what common misconceptions trip up candidates, and how to think about your next steps once you pass. If you are ready to go deeper and follow a structured, step-by-step study plan, you can continue with the full audio course for Security+ inside the Bare Metal Cyber Audio Academy.

This is your weekly cyber news roll-up for the week ending November 27th, 2025. This week revolves around quiet dependencies turning into loud problems, from abandoned calendar links that can be hijacked to analytics and customer platforms leaking sensitive context. You will hear about a breach at an OpenAI analytics vendor that exposes who is building on artificial intelligence, A I, projects and a ransomware hit on Asahi and Iberia that mixes large data leaks with operational disruption and reputational damage. Developers face a heavy supply chain week as poisoned npm packages, GitHub workflows, and a self spreading JavaScript worm target build systems and secrets. At the same time, flaws in logging agents, emergency alert platforms, and Ray powered A I clusters show how core infrastructure can be hijacked for stealth access, cryptomining, or simply going dark when people need it most.

Across the full set of stories, the focus is on how attackers exploit trusted tools and identity layers that many teams treat as background plumbing. You will hear how spyware vendors are turning secure messaging users into targets, how years of pasting code into online tools has quietly exposed live credentials, and how flaws in Oracle identity, Azure Bastion, and Grafana can hand over powerful access with a few crafted requests. Website and endpoint risks also feature, from W three Total Cache and FortiWeb to seven zip, reminding teams that small utilities and plugins can still open big doors. The episode is designed for executives, security teams, builders, and students who need a fast weekly sweep of the real attack surface, stitched across cloud, identity, and software factories, available at DailyCyber.news. By the end, you will have a clear sense of where your own quiet dependencies might be hiding.

In this episode, we uncover the reality of “Zero Trust theater”—where organizations invest in flashy front gates like MFA prompts, dashboards, and vendor logos while leaving the walls behind them flimsy and unprotected. Listeners will learn how these illusions are built, where attackers push through the cardboard, and the specific tactics adversaries use to bypass props. From consent phishing and token replay to legacy carve-outs and SaaS trust chains, the episode paints a vivid picture of why optics without structure fail.

You’ll also gain practical insight into the skills that strengthen real Zero Trust. By the end, you’ll understand how to operationalize least privilege, enforce identity at every hop, design microsegmentation that actually holds, and measure resilience through meaningful metrics rather than green lights. This is more than theory—it’s a guide to recognizing illusions, breaking free from stagecraft, and building durable frameworks that withstand pressure.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is your weekly cyber news roll-up for the week ending November 21st, 2025. We track a crippling cyberattack on a major automaker that shut factories and erased hundreds of millions in profit. We also follow a suspected China aligned espionage group that turned an artificial intelligence, A I, coding agent into an automated intrusion assistant. Fresh consumer and supporter data breaches, including a social engineering hit on a food delivery platform and exposure of political affiliation records, show how one person or vendor mistake can unlock large data sets. Critical flaws in Fortinet FortiWeb web application firewalls and an actively exploited Windows kernel bug round out the list of urgent patches for the week.

You will hear clear run downs of each of the week’s biggest stories, from industrial shutdowns and agent driven intrusions to social engineering breaches and vendor failures. We explain how third party services, software supply chain projects, law enforcement case systems, and cloud platforms like Azure are being probed and stressed, and what that means for executives, security teams, builders, and students trying to stay ahead. Along the way we call out who is most exposed, which signals in logs and dashboards deserve a second look, and which updates should move to the front of the queue. The episode is designed as a fast, practical briefing that you can replay or share with your teams, available at DailyCyber.news.