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Technology Tap
Technology Tap
Cybersecurity Fundamentals: Hunting Weak Spots Chapter 8
What’s the weakest link in your world—an old router, a forgotten Windows box, or that “anyone with the link” setting you meant to change? We unpack the real vulnerabilities hiding in small businesses, nonprofits, and home networks, then share a clear playbook to find them early and fix them fast without enterprise budgets.
We start with the quiet culprits: end‑of‑life operating systems, abandoned firmware, and default passwords that ship on printers, cameras, and routers. You’ll hear why isolation, segmentation, and least privilege are lifesavers when replacement isn’t an option. From ransomware on aging desktops to misconfigured cloud shares that leak donor lists, we connect everyday scenarios to practical countermeasures like MFA, strong crypto, key rotation, and simple access reviews.
Then we go deeper into application and web risks—SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, race conditions, buffer overflows—and how attackers exploit timing and input validation gaps. We break down supply chain threats, where a compromised plugin server can Trojanize an entire customer base, and show how to vet vendors with a software bill of materials and clear service level terms. You’ll also get a workable monitoring routine: weekly vulnerability scans (credentialed and non‑credentialed), reputable threat feeds like IBM X‑Force and Abuse.ch, and dark web awareness for leaked credentials.
To round it out, we map a no‑nonsense remediation loop: discover, analyze, fix, verify, repeat. Learn to use CVE identifiers and CVSS scores to prioritize by risk and business impact, spot false positives and negatives, and handle patches that break production with rollbacks and compensating controls. Along the way, we share a memorable bug bounty story that proves anyone—even a kid—can help make the internet safer. Subscribe for more practical cybersecurity, share this with someone running on “set it and forget it,” and leave a review telling us the one update you’re making today.
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.
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Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
TikTok @ProfessorJrod
ProfessorJRod@gmail.com
@Prof_JRod
Instagram ProfessorJRod
Hey, welcome to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J. Rock. In this episode, finding the weak spot: probability management for real people. Let's tap in. Welcome back to Technology Tap, the show where we bridge everyday life and cybersecurity. I'm your host, Professor J-Rodd, and today we're going hunting for weak spots. Every business, every nonprofit, every home network has them. The forgotten laptop in the back office, the old Wi-Fi router, the spreadsheet that should be public, or like that movie War Games, that phone number that never got disconnected. In cybersecurity, that's what we call vulnerabilities. The cracks attackers look for before breaking in. So grab your notebook and maybe a cup of coffee and let's learn how small organizations and ordinary users can manage vulnerabilities just like the big leagues do. The hidden cracks. Picture a small auto repair shop. They use an ancient Windows 7 desktop to print invoices. One morning, every file name ends with dot locked. The screen reads, pay$600 in Bitcoin to restore your data. That's ransomware. And it's a symptoms of poor vulnerability management. Operating system vulnerabilities. An old operating system stop receiving patches. Once Microsoft ends support, which it just did for Windows 10, every newly discovered bug becomes a backdoor that never locks again. For big companies, patching is a routine. For mom and pop stores, updates feel risky. What if it breaks my software? But not updating is worse. Legacy and EOL systems. A community clinic is still running a Windows XP radiology viewer camp patch. Solution isolate it. Put it on its own VLANs, disconnect the internet access, and control who can touch it. Legacy doesn't mean doesn't have to be vulnerable, it just needs boundaries. Firmware and virtualization. Always check vendor support pages. If none exists, replace it. Or what you can do is call your ISP saying that your packets are dropping, that every time you connect to the internet, it drops and they'll send you a new router for free. Virtualization 2 isn't immune. Misconfigured hypervisor leak memory or credentials between guest VMs. Zero Day Vulnerabilities. A zero day is a flaw discovered by criminals before the vendors knows and exist. In 2021, a small accounting firm were hit via zero day in their remote desktop gateways because someone left the service open to the internet with default credentials. Zero Day reminds us that security is a race. We can't patch what we don't know, but we can prepare with segmentation, logging, and backups. Misconfiguration and human error. They share documents in Google Drive and want transparency. One volunteer clicks. Anyone with the link can view. Weeks later, donor information surfaces on a local Facebook group. That's cloud misconfiguration. No hacker genius is required. Just click in the wrong menu. Default settings. Printers, cameras, routers ship with admin password as a default login. Attackers scan the internet looking for them. Change default always. Cryptographic slip ups. A small law firm upholds client contracts to a site using an outdated SHA-1 encryption. Encryption is only as strong as its algorithm. Decommission weak ciphers and rotate keys regularly. Rooting and jailbreaking. At a local phone repair shop, a tech roots Andrew phones to speed them up. Rooting disabled security layers inviting spyware. Explain to staff why convenience should never outweigh control, plus it avoids the warranty on it. Misconfigurations aren't flashy, but they cause more breaches than zero days ever will. Applications and cloud vulnerabilities. Next up, a family-owned gym with an online sign up. A member reports weird pop-ups. The web the developer finds drop table members in the log. Classic SQL injection. Common app bugs, race conditions. Two users booking the same yoga slot simultaneously. Both confirm attacker exploits timing like that to manipulate data. Buffer Overflow. Too much input crashes the process. Malware writes the overflow to execute code. Malicious updates. An attacker compromise a plugin server, everyone who updates downloads the Trojan. Web vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting, malicious code in a comic field, and comment field steals cookies. CSRF users tricked into clicking links that change settings. Teach clients validate input, sanitize output, patch plugins. Cloud example. A local bakery uses a free cloud backup. The vendor goes back rump and deletes all data after 30 days. Always read the SLL, enable MFA as multifactor authentication, SOA service level agreement, and encrypt before uploading. Supply chain risk. A neighborhood MSP installs a remote management tool. Months later, attackers exploit that vendors updated server. Not every customer inherits the infection. Vet suppliers request software bill or materials list. Scanning the surface. How do we find these issues before bad actors do? Vulnerability scanner. A local library runs OpenVAS weekly. It reports outdated Apache modules and missing patches. Credential scan logs in for details. Non-credential shows what outsider sees, schedule both. Threat feeds. Think of a threat feed like a neighborhood watch. Sites such as IBM XFORS or Abuse.ch publish new attack signatures. Every small IT team can subscribe to free feeds or use built-in tools like Microsoft Defender Threat Intel. Deep and Dark Web Awareness. The deep web includes private databases. The dark web requires Tor. Analyst monitoring for lead credentials. For instance, that coffee shop loyalty app that stores passwords in plain text. Vulnerability identification isn't paranoia, it's maintenance, like checking tire pressure before road trip. Testing and validation. Now we've tested the defenses. Penetration testing. Community college often hosts free pen testers for local nonprofits. Students under supervision run gray box tests. Black box is outsider, white box is full access. Bug bounties, a regional credit union, offers gift cards for responsibly reported flaws. Bug bounties turn curiosity into collaboration instead of crime. This is a story about a kid for Apple FaceTime. Look it up. I tell the story in my classroom where he found a bug and they he ended up getting a bounty from Apple. Auditing. Quarterly audits ensure policy match reality. Are firewalls rules undocumented? Are admin counts still active after resignation? Testing isn't about blame, it's about learning before the adversary does. Analysis and Remediation. Discover, analyze, fix, verify, repeat. CVE and CVSS. Every public flaw gets a CVE ID and a CVSS score. Example A router floor with a CVSS of 9.8 is critical. Prioritized by risk and business impact, not fear. False positives or negatives, a scanner flags an OSMB port, but it's already blocked by a firewall. That's a false positive. Or another misconfigured NAS, that's a false negative. Cross-check locks, trust, but verify. Remediation steps, patch or upgrade. If not possible, segment or apply compensating controls or document exceptions, or four, rescan and confirm closure. At a local daycare, patching breaks attendance software. They roll back, contact the vendor, apply the patch once fixed, demonstrating smart risk management. Alright, now it's time for the questions. I have four multiple choice questions, comp Tia style multiple choice questions. I will read each one, then I'll give you the four choices. Read again, four choices again, give you five seconds. Hopefully, you get four out of four. Question one Which of the following best describes a zero day vulnerability? A a flaw that has that has a vendor patch available but isn't installed. B a flaw unknown to the vendor with no fix yet released. C a misconfiguration in cloud storage permissions, or D an outdated encryption protocol. I'll read it again. Which of the following best describes a zero day vulnerability? A a flaw that has a vendor patch available but isn't installed. B a flaw unknown to the vendor with no fix yet released. C a misconfiguration in cloud storage permission or D an outdated encryption protocol. I'll give you five seconds to think about it. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The answer is B. A flaw unknown to the vendor with no fix yet released. A zero day is exploited before the vendor can issue a patch, leaving zero days to respond. Now, a zero day is very dangerous, and this is one of those things that you have to monitor what's going on on the internet, right? Because if there's a zero day and there's a and it's a patch release for the zero day, then you quickly have to install it. Because if now you're invulnerable, you're vulnerable. This happens a lot with phones, guys. And there's a lot of people, I know because my students tell me that do not like to update their phones. They have this thing where, oh, if I update my phone, my battery's gonna die, blah blah blah. Okay, do what you want, but you are leaving yourself possibly exposed to a compromise. And you don't want that. And if you want to, especially if you want to be cybersecurity, you have to be in that mindset of update, update, update. What Apple likes to do is and read it the next time it comes up with an update. It doesn't have to be an emergency update, it can be like a regular update. It'll say, We have a new emojis out plus some security updates. They say that because they they tease you with the emoji, but they really want you to install the security updates. And there's times where they'll that you see on the news where they'll say, Oh, Apple or Chrome or Windows, I've seen this in the last two or three years, wants you, needs you to update right away. I think the last one was Apple, and then the time before that was Chrome. I think during COVID, maybe, where they they had a flaw, they discovered a flaw, a zero day, and then they released a patch, and they were telling everybody to update their Chrome like that day. So, you know, those are things that you as a cybersecurity person, student, have to pay attention to, and you know, don't waste time, don't you know, don't have the mindset, well, well, I'm not gonna update my phone because my phone is gonna kill my battery. No, even if it kills your battery, you gotta update. So, all right, question two. During a vulnerability scan, an organization discover several findings that aren't actually exploitable because the affected service is disabled. What does this represent? A a false positive, b a false negative, d benignal alert or or d fake news. I'll read it again. During the vulnerability scan, an organization discovers several findings that aren't actually exploitable. Because the affected service is disabled. What does this represent? A false news, a false positive, b false negative, C benign alert, or D false news? I'll give you five seconds. Think about it. Five, four, three, two, one, and the answer is a false positive, a scanner incorrectly labeled inactive components as vulnerable. Alright. Did we get two out of two so far? Hopefully we have. Next, a local retailer wants to know which discover vulnerability should be fixed first. Which framework helps rank severely from 0 to 10? A CVSS Common Vulnerability Scoring System. B CVE Common Vulnerability and Exposure and Exposures C ISO 27001 or D PCI DSS. I read it again. A local retailer wants to know which discover vulnerabilities should be fixed first. Which framework helps rank severity from 0 to 10? A CVSS Common Vulnerability Scoring System. B CBE Common Vulnerability and Exposure C ISO 27001 or D PCI DSS. I'll give you five seconds to think about it. 54 3 2 1. Well, one of the things that you could eliminate right away is PCI DSS because it doesn't say specifically his credit card. So that one is gone. So you're left with three ISO 227001. Doesn't fall into this category. So you're left with A and B and the answer is A. Common vulnerability scoring system. Quantify severely so teams can prioritize remediation. Alright, did you get three for three? Let's go four for four. What is the most effective way for small business to protect against configuration errors in cloud storage? A use default settings provided by the vendor. B review access control and enable least privilege permission. C disabled all encryption option. Or D share files publicly for transparency. I'll read it again. What is the most effective way for small business to protect against configuration errors and cloud storage? A use default settings provided by the vendor. B review access control and enable lease privilege permission. C disable all encryption options or D share files publicly for transparency. So let's so what is he trying to do? For small to protect against configuration errors, right? Obviously, it's not D, right? You're not gonna share files publicly for transparency. And it's not C, you're not gonna disable all encryption options, right? The keywords to protect against, right? So you're not gonna disable encryption options. You never ever use the default settings provided by the vendor, right? All the default settings need to be changed, right? Admin password or admin admin is usually the default username and password. So the answer is B review access control enable least privilege permission. Least privilege reviews prevents accidental accidental public exposure of sensitive data. Hopefully you got four out of four, right? If you did, congratulations. That's what's up. You're almost ready to take the security plus exam. But let me let me piggyback on the on the zero day, which I think it was important. Now, if I remember the story correctly, it was a kid who had a Fortnite. This is when Fortnite first came out. He was a member of a Fortnite group, and him and his friends, his buddies, created a group FaceTime Fortnite group. Where they, you know, when they play, they would call each other via FaceTime. Right? That's what kids do. I don't know. This is this is like 10 years ago, maybe less. I was a high school teacher, so it was maybe yeah, less than about six, seven years ago, eight years ago, maybe. And what happened is he called his friend via FaceTime, and then he accidentally called himself. His friend did not pick up the phone. But I think because of that bug that he called himself, if I'm getting the story right, he turned on his friend's mic without his friend realizing that it turned on. So he can hear his friend talking. And this is like a 13-year-old kid, right? This is not a grown adult, 13-year-old kid. He can hear his friend talking, but his friend did not know that his mic was on. You know what kind of security implications that is? Imagine if you're able to do that to a president, member of Congress, anybody, CEO of a major company, right? If you were able to do that to Warren Buffett, right? And you can listen to all his stuff that he's doing, though how to make money the way he does, that will be amazing. But it's also a huge security risk. So he I think he told his mom, and his mom emailed uh Apple like a few times. It took a quite a few times for them to them emailing Apple for then Apple to actually respond back. And when they did, you know, the mom said, Hey, this is what's going on, and they tested it, and they ended up giving the kid, I think they gave him 30 grand for finding that. And I think they set up a college fund for the kid because he was only 13, so that when he goes to college, you know, they you know that that money is already paid. Hey, if you're that kid, man, reach out to me, Professor Jrod, J R O D at Gmail.com. I would love to talk to you about the zero day thing from Apple back in the day. So yeah, the kid ended up, you know, making making some money, and and you know, or if you know the kid, if anybody knows the kid, but yeah, he ended up making money, you know, and people this this is stuff people do this bug bounties for a living. I don't know if there's you know, if if there's do this for a living or they do this as a side hustle, it could be a great side hustle. I don't know if it if you want to do this for a living, but definitely is a great side hustle for bug bounties. So, what it what did Apple ended up doing? For a while, Apple shut down group FaceTime, they had no choice. Like they like on the fly, they didn't know how to fix it. So to remediate that, which is a zero day, that's a zero day. Uh to remediate that, they disabled group FaceTime for everybody for a bit, and then they fixed it, right? Put it, sent the patch, right? Tested it, sent it to everybody, right? They ask you to install it, and then they put on they turned on group FaceTime. But yeah, that's that's crazy, right? That that he does that, and just just from that kid accidentally, you know, calling himself, that's what triggered it. So you gotta be careful, and again, guys, when they ask you your phone, Windows, Chrome, whatever it is that you're using, your your even your smart TV, right? Your Xbox, you good, you gamers, right? You gamers are diligent when it says, Hey, we have an update for your Xbox. Oh, you're right there, downloading that and update up uploading that and installing that patch right away. And when they say, Hey, we found a bug in Xbox or PS5 or whatever you're using, you're quick to do that. So be as quick to do this when it's your phone, when it's an app, when it's your computer system, right? If it's Word, Office, right? All these things that we use, all these products that we use, guys. We and that's the and if you never heard the first episode of my of this podcast way back in 2020, it's titled Why We Update Our Devices. This is why. Right? We need to keep our device updated to protect ourselves from the bad guys. Because the bad guys are out there, they don't matter how small or how big your company is. If you are vulnerable, it is it's just it's not a question of, you know, it's only a question of when when they hit it. Now, I know small businesses, a lot of them don't care about cyber because it's an expense and they don't care, but until they get hacked, right? It's like a lot of people don't care about backups until their thing crashes, their hard drive crashes, or their server crashes, then they're like, oh my god, I should have backed up. Right? So that's a that's a problem that we still as IT people, we still need to work on. We still need to, you know, we need to work on that stuff. All right, we covered a lot today. From forgotten routers to community bug bounties. Vulnerability management isn't about paranoia, it's about care. When you patch that system, update that router or train that intern, you're not just protecting data, you're protecting jobs, paychecks, and a peace of mind. Right? And this kind of like leads to the thing that I like to tell my students that they don't like me saying it, is like every now and then you see somebody doing something at work, you have to tell. You know, you have to be a snitch. Even I mean, that's a bad word, but you have to tell because if you don't, it could affect your money, it could affect your job, it could affect you getting a paycheck that week, it could affect you, you know, still having a job. So keep that in mind when you see somebody doing something they're not supposed to. All right, thanks for listening to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J-Rod. Stay curious, stay cautious, and above all, keep tapping into technology. This has been a presentation of Little Cha Cha Productions, art by Sarah, music by Joe Kim. We're now part of the Pod Match Network. You can follow me at TikTok at Professor Jrod at J R O D, or you can email me at professorjrodjrod at gmail.com, you can do it.