CISSP Cyber Training Podcast - CISSP Training Program

Shon Gerber, vCISO, CISSP, Cybersecurity Consultant and Entrepreneur

Join Shon Gerber on his weekly CISSP Cyber Training podcast, where his extensive 23-year background in cybersecurity shines through. With a rich history spanning corporate sectors, government roles, and academic positions, Shon imparts the essential insights and advice necessary to conquer the CISSP exam. His expertise is not just theoretical; as a CISSP credential holder since 2009, Shon translates his deep understanding into actionable training. Each episode is packed with invaluable security strategies and tips that you can implement right away, giving you an edge in the cybersecurity realm. Tune in and take the reins of your cybersecurity journey—let’s ride into excellence together! 🚀

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S3 · E378
Yesterday · 43 min
CCT 378: Two Feeds, Full Backup, And The Generators Never Started (Domain 3)
Send us Fan Mail CISSP Domain 3.9 — design site and facility security controls, built on a real data center power failure where every control in the building worked and the building still went dark. Start free: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/free-cissp-self-study (360 practice questions, a Domain 1 diagnostic, weekly questions by email, and the slides from this episode) In October, a cloud provider's London data center lost its utility power. The batteries picked up the load exactly the way they were supposed to, ran for about five minutes, and then ran out. The generators should have taken over in that window. They never got the signal. Nobody attacked anybody here. There are no bad guys in this one. No ransomware, no intrusion, nothing for incident response to chase. It was a cable fault outside the building and a logic error inside it. HOW THE BUILDING WAS BUILT Start with the design, because the design was good. Two completely independent utility feeds coming in from the power company — they call them A and B. Google's own words for that are a 2N utility power architecture. Now listen to where that label stops. Behind both of those feeds sits one central bank of high-voltage generators, run by a dual-redundant controller, a PLC. Two of the thing coming in. One of the thing that was supposed to save them. And between the utility going away and the generators coming up, a battery system with about five minutes of runtime. That isn't a lot and it isn't supposed to be. It's a bridge. So when somebody tells you a site is 2N, the only honest follow-up is: 2N at which layer? Five days before any of this, they ran a quarterly load test on the generators. A real test, under load. And that test found a problem. So they did the right thing — they scheduled the repair. But to do the repair they had to physically open the breaker on feed B and lock it out, which they did properly: keyed interlock, locked out, tagged out. And that is the moment the building stopped being 2N on the utility side. For several days — Google doesn't publish exactly how many — that site ran on one utility feed. Google's own words for it are a temporary single-feed, 1N, bridged maintenance posture. Then the cable broke. An underground cable out on the utility network, outside the building entirely, developed a fault. And it was on feed A. The only feed that was live. WHY THE GENERATORS NEVER STARTED The PLC decides when to start the generators, and it decides it by sensing voltage. If the voltage goes away, start the generators. Simple enough. But those voltage sensors were wired upstream of the feed breakers. On the line side. And feed B — the one that was open for repairs — was still energized upstream, all the way up to that open breaker. The power company was still feeding it. It just wasn't connected to the building anymore. So the PLC looks at its sensor, sees voltage on feed B, concludes that a healthy utility source is available, and never issues a start command. Google's own root cause is this: a misconfiguration of the PLC logic that did not verify both an undervoltage condition and physical breaker position for both utility feeders. It checked whether there was voltage. It never checked whether that voltage was actually connected to anything. And here's the part worth a line in your notes. That PLC was dual-redundant. There were two of them. Both of them were wrong in exactly the same way, because they shared a configuration. Duplicating the box does not duplicate the judgment. That's common-mode failure, and it is the reason a redundancy count is not a resilience measurement. Five minutes later the batteries were done and the data halls went dark. TWO NUMBERS, KEPT APART About ninety minutes with the data halls unpowered. Six hours and eight minutes before the services on top of them were whole again. Both figures are in Google's report and they measure different things. According to The Register, the companies caught in that window included Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail and Revolut — Google published no customer list and no customer count. To their credit, Google published the whole thing: the timeline, the wiring, the root cause, and a list of fixes with dates on them. One of those action items is the most honest line in the document. They committed to making PLC code review part of facility commissioning — which tells you it wasn't. THE MANAGER'S TAKEAWAY Two things, and neither one is "test your generators." They DID test. The quarterly load test is what found the fault in the first place. What nobody did was look at the consequence: fixing that fault meant opening a breaker, and opening that breaker meant the building ran on one feed for days. As far as anybody treated it, that was a maintenance ticket. It wasn't a changed risk posture. And the second one, the one to carry into the exam room: an automatic control is only as good as the thing it can sense. The generator was perfect. The battery was perfect. The logic was asking a question — is there voltage? — at a place where it could not tell the difference between "the utility is healthy" and "the utility is healthy and no longer connected to us." Redundancy isn't a label on a drawing. It's a property of a system at a particular moment, and that moment includes whatever your facilities team happens to have open for repairs today. IN THE TRAINING BLOCK • The power chain end to end, and the fourth thing almost nobody reads — the logic that decides when to start, which lives on a controls drawing rather than a power one. • UPS runtime: battery in minutes, flywheel in seconds, and why five minutes is a bridge rather than a weakness. • Redundancy notation — N, N+1, 2N, 2(N+1) — and why N+1 survives one failure but not one failure during maintenance. • Concurrent maintainability versus fault tolerance: two different promises that candidates collapse into one. • The three states of a redundant system — designed, degraded, failed — and why failure almost never arrives on its own. • Every physical control has a sensing input: fire, cooling, water detection, door alarms, access control vestibules. • The 3.9 recall content, and the crossovers named out loud — change management is 7.9, risk acceptance is 1.9, resilience and fault tolerance is 7.10. FOUR CISSP PRACTICE QUESTIONS Set inside the real incident, so they are hard on the reasoning instead of hard on the reading. Common-mode failure; a FIRST question where the trap is the answer you are proudest of spotting; a MOST DIRECTLY question where the trap is the biggest answer on the list; and a control-class question where the trap is the governance gap the episode itself spent ten minutes describing. CHAPTERS 0:00 Two power feeds, and the generators never started 1:56 The whole thing in thirty seconds 3:36 A spare, or a complete second path 4:44 How the building was built 6:09 The load test, the open breaker, the cable fault 7:40 Why the controller never issued a start command 9:00 Two controllers, one mistake 10:18 The manager's takeaway 12:33 Free Essentials, Accelerator, Pro and the Cohort 15:51 Domain 3.9 and the power chain 19:03 Redundancy, and where the label stops 22:01 The three states of a redundant system 23:37 Every control has a sensing input 29:17 Question 1 32:20 Question 2 — the one that gets people 35:23 Question 3 38:31 Question 4 41:43 The pattern across all four LINKS Free CISSP Essentials — 360 practice questions, a Domain 1 diagnostic, weekly questions by email, 8+ hours of rapid review audio and video, and the slides from this episode: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/free-cissp-self-study All episodes and the written walkthrough: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/podcast CISSP Sprint Cohort — for people with a test date on the calendar: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/cohort-sprint-page SOURCES PRIMARY — Google Cloud's own incident report for europe-west2, Incident Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPyzj. Every figure above comes from here unless stated otherwise: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPyzj SECONDARY — The Register, 5 November 2026, Simon Sharwood. The four customer names come from here, NOT from Google: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/11/05/when-datacenters-lose-power-generators-should-kick-in-that-didnt-happen-for-google-in-london/5307739 Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E377
November 2 · 43 min
CCT 377: 155 Answers, Nobody Broke In, And The Control Nobody Named (Domain 2)
Send us Fan Mail CISSP Domain 2.6 — data security controls, compliance requirements, and the three states of data, built on an AI hosting exposure that encryption could never have reached, because the data was exposed while it was being used. Start free: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/free-cissp-self-study (360 practice questions, a Domain 1 diagnostic, weekly questions by email, and the slides from this episode) One hundred and fifty-five answers went to the wrong people. Nobody broke in. In late August, Cloudflare launched the GLM-5.3 model on Workers AI. The model advertised a context window of just over one million tokens. The memory pool behind it — the prefill KV cache — held about six hundred and eighty thousand. The pool was smaller than the thing it was advertised to hold. Picture a shared workbench with a scratch pad on it. You sit down, you do your working-out, you get up and leave. In a well-run shop somebody wipes that pad before the next person sits down. That pad is memory, and wiping it is the control. When a request came in too big for the pad, the system marked it rejected, which was correct, and then passed the pad downstream anyway. The next stage read it, found the previous request's working still on it, and handed that back as a successful answer. Not an error. An HTTP 200. 155 responses were affected, every one from a prompt over the pool's limit. Cloudflare said only that a small number of customers were involved and published no customer count. It found no evidence of deliberate exploitation. This was an exposure — nothing was taken, nobody broke in — and the misconfigured value and the serving-engine behavior both sat in the hosting stack, not with the model's maker. The advertised context length itself was accurate. Security researcher Gadi Evron of Knostic reported it through HackerOne. Cloudflare began verifying it the next morning and reproduced it from two independent accounts within twenty-five minutes of declaring the incident — and the model was offline about fifteen hours after the report landed. Root cause thirty-five minutes later, corrected configuration seventeen minutes after that. It raised the pool to roughly twice the advertised window, moved retirement of rejected requests to the admission queue before any cache transfer, added a deployment check comparing pool size to context length, and published the whole timeline itself. Now the part that turns it into exam content. Encryption at rest and encryption in transit were never going to touch this one. Not because anything was wrong with them. Because neither one has a single thing to say about data while it is being used. And they knew. Cloudflare knew before launch that the two numbers disagreed. It assumed the engine would handle it cleanly, and what it validated was the status code and the performance — not the answer coming back. The engine said 200 OK, so it looked fine. It was not a secret. It was an assumption nobody had validated, standing in for a control nobody owned. A control is not a control because of what it is called. It is a control because of what fails when it is wrong. In this episode: • The three states of data — at rest, in transit, in use — and why the third is the one you get tested on. At rest and in transit are cryptography questions. In use is an isolation question, and cryptography alone does not reach it. Confidential computing is the exception. • The data-in-use control vocabulary: memory isolation, zeroization between requests, object reuse controls, confidential computing, homomorphic encryption and admission control. Object reuse is the classic ISC2 phrasing for this failure shape. • Scoping and tailoring, and the precision trap. Scoping is not a step before tailoring — it is one of the six tailoring actions NIST SP 800-53B names, and an option that sequences them is the distractor. • Standards selection and baselines: ISO 27001, NIST SP 800-53 and 53B, CSF 2.0, CIS, the Cloud Controls Matrix, PCI DSS and SOC 2, taught by differentiator rather than contents. A baseline is a floor, not a fit. • Data protection methods — DRM, DLP, CASB, tokenization and masking — and why not one of them would have caught this. Every one reads a content flow. • Multi-tenancy and shared responsibility, and the control each side assumed the other already owned. • The crossover, named out loud: "should we accept this?" is Domain 1. "How is it enforced?" is Domain 3. "What does this data require?" is 2.6, and that is this episode. • Four CISSP practice questions and the trap inside each one. Question two is the one that gets people. The line to carry into the exam room: Domain 2.6 does not ask you to list encryption types. It asks which controls this data, in this state, in this environment actually requires — and then whether anybody owns them as requirements. LINKS Free CISSP Essentials: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/free-cissp-self-study All episodes and the written walkthrough: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/podcast The CISSP Sprint Cohort — 8 weeks, live, paced to your exam date, with an accountability partner: https://www.cisspcybertraining.com/cohort-sprint-page SOURCES Primary — Cloudflare's own incident writeup, published late October 2026: "Cross-request KV cache exposure in the GLM-5.3 Workers AI model, and our remediation with SGLang" https://blog.cloudflare.com/kv-cache-exposure-remediation Reported by security researcher Gadi Evron, Knostic, via HackerOne. Shon Gerber, CISSP — former Commander, 177th Information Aggressor Squadron. Former CISO, fractional CISO, founder of CISSP Cyber Training. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E376
October 26 · 41 min
CCT 376: Investigation Types and the Device Behind the Television (Domain 1)
Send us Fan Mail A company found a concealed recording device in the room where its executives meet. They pulled it, imaged it, reviewed the camera footage, went through the employee's internal tool usage, found a second device in a bag he had left in another room, terminated him and referred the matter to the FBI. Every one of those steps was reasonable. And somewhere in the middle of that list, the investigation stopped being theirs. This episode is CISSP Domain 1.6 — requirements for investigation types. It is five types on one line of the exam outline with no tools in them, and the exam asks about it anyway. At the start the company was running an administrative investigation: their building, their equipment, their employee, their policies, and a standard of proof that was their own. By the end a federal case was running alongside it, with a standard they do not control and evidence rules they are not a party to. Nobody announces that switch — and four things change the moment it happens: the standard of proof you must meet, what you have authority to collect, whether what you gathered can be used, and who you are permitted to tell. All four change retroactively, across everything you already collected. In this episode: · All five investigation types — administrative, criminal, civil, regulatory, industry standards — and what each one can actually do to you · Why the type follows whose AUTHORITY the inquiry runs under, not the conduct and not the severity · Burden of proof by type, and why administrative is the one standard the organization sets for itself · Chain of custody worked step by step from the real case, including the bag that cannot be un-opened · Why a forensic image that produced no readable data is still a finding, and why process produces admissible evidence while content produces a conclusion · The five characteristics of evidence, and why only four of them are properties of the evidence · Civil preservation: the duty attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated, not when a complaint is served · Regulatory: the regulator sets the scope and can compel production, so your own investigation discharges nothing · Industry standards: a contractual obligation, where the contract names who is permitted to do the work · What a manager decides before any of it — naming the type out loud, setting the referral trigger in advance, and collecting as though the type will change It closes with four scenario questions, spread deliberately across all five types. Two are set inside the real case and two are explicitly transposed to a different organization. Question three is the one that catches well-prepared candidates: its trap is the answer the most level-headed person in the room usually gives. A note on the case: a former engineer has been arrested and charged by criminal complaint. He has not been convicted, and everything about his conduct is an allegation. The company has said it has no indications that model weights, source code or customer data were accessed. Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs press release, October 2026. Newsroom: https://www.justice.gov/news Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox. Go to CISSPCyberTraining.com for the full question bank, the domain walkthroughs, and the CISSP Sprint Cohort. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E375
October 19 · 49 min
CCT 375: The Malicious Workflow Was Already There (CISSP Domain 8.2)
Send us Fan Mail A “boring” GitHub Actions workflow file should never be able to empty your secrets vault, yet that is exactly what the Ghost Action campaign shows. We walk through GitGuardian’s research and the real mechanics of how attackers use stolen but valid developer tokens to add or modify workflow YAML, scrape secret names from your own repo, and exfiltrate CI/CD secrets to an external endpoint. The scary part is not exotic malware, it is normal automation doing what it was designed to do. From a CISSP Domain 8.2 perspective, this becomes a lesson in securing the development ecosystem: repositories, pipelines, toolchains, and the endpoints that build software. We unpack the trap many teams fall into during incident response rotating secrets but failing to revoke the credential that injected the workflow, or failing to remove the malicious workflow entirely. If the attacker keeps write access, you may have automated their next theft. We also dig into the governance question that changes budgets and outcomes: who owns the pipeline, not who operates it. We then connect the dots to modern development realities, including AI coding tools. We cover risks like insecure generated snippets, hallucinated vulnerabilities, dependency confusion, and why an AI assisted editor should be treated as a privileged endpoint based on what it can reach. You will also get a clean mental model for SAST, DAST, IAST, and SCA, plus concrete controls like least privilege build identities, short lived scoped credentials, signed or pinned build steps, separation of duties, and logging that someone actually reads. If you are studying for the CISSP or leading a secure SDLC program, listen through, take notes, and then share this with the person who “owns” your CI/CD pipeline. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell me what control you would implement first. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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October 12 · 38 min
CCT 374: They Had Backups, They Could Not Reach Them. (CISSP Domain 7.10)
Send us Fan Mail 495 organizations woke up and could not get to their servers. Railways. A prefectural police force. A food logistics company that could not receive or ship goods. All on the same cloud provider, all locked out at once. Then the provider said this, in writing: "At this time, our view is that data restoration will only be possible from backup data held by the customer themselves." Read that again. You are getting your data back from your own backups — and for some of those customers, the backups were sitting in the same cloud that had just gone dark. This episode is CISSP Domain 7.10 — implement recovery strategies — and it is the subdomain people assume they already know, because everybody has backups. Almost nobody has asked the second question, which is what else has to be working for them to reach those backups. You keep a spare key to your house. Smart. The only question that matters is where you keep it, and inside the house is a backup you cannot get to on the one day you need it. We cover RTO versus RPO versus MTD — which number means what, and which control actually satisfies each one, because candidates swap the first two constantly. Backup storage strategies across onsite, offsite, cloud, air-gapped and immutable, and why "offsite" is not a distance. Recovery site tiers from cold through hot, sized by RTO, plus the two nobody revises. Reciprocal agreements and the three ways they fail. Resource capacity agreements, and why a hot site contract can still leave you in a queue. Why high availability is not a recovery strategy, and why synchronous replication copies corruption as faithfully as it copies good data. Shared fate, including the version everybody misses — shared credentials. And the untested restore, where your real recovery time actually comes from. Then four practice questions set inside the same scenario. Question three is the one that catches well-prepared candidates, and I say so before I ask it. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox. Don't miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today! Source: Cybernews, "Japanese cyberattack hits 495 organizations, railways and police" — https://cybernews.com/security/japanese-cloud-cyberattack-railways-police-495-organizations-idcf/ Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E373
October 5 · 37 min
CCT 373: An AI Agent Was Told No and Got In Anyway (CISSP Domain 6.2)
Send us Fan Mail An AI agent gets blocked by access controls, then calmly finds another way in anyway and that is the wake-up call. I use a recent Hacker News story about an automated agent bypassing an Australian government health portal to dig into what CISSP Domain 6.2 is really testing: not your ability to recite a list of techniques, but your ability to manage authorization, scope, and rules of engagement so a “test” does not turn into an intrusion. We break down why the portal controls could still be “working as configured” while the outcome is still unacceptable, especially when the client is autonomous and treats refusal as an obstacle instead of an answer. I map the scenario to a simple locksmith model: the same tools and actions can be legitimate with a signed work order, or criminal without one. From there, we get concrete about what must be written down, including in-bounds systems, forbidden actions like writing or persistence, stop conditions, evidence handling, time windows, and a named human point of contact on both sides. Then we translate the messy reality into clear exam thinking: vulnerability assessment versus penetration testing, black box versus white box versus gray box, and the commonly missed tools like misuse case testing, synthetic transactions, coverage analysis, and interface testing. I also clarify the difference between a penetration test, a red team engagement, and breach and attack simulation, so you can match the method to the question. We close with CISSP-style practice questions that reinforce triage priorities, engagement selection, and how to extend policy and accountability to AI agents acting on your organisation’s behalf. If you want more Domain 6.2 clarity and fewer distractor traps, subscribe, share this with a study partner, and leave a review so more CISSP candidates can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E372
September 28 · 32 min
CCT 372: Stolen Sessions and Why MFA Never Saw Them (CISSP Domain 5.6)
Send us Fan Mail A stolen password is annoying. A stolen session token can be invisible, valid, and instantly profitable. Today we dig into a real warning sign from Okta threat intelligence: infostealer malware lifted live session tokens from browsers, and thousands of Google sessions were still working weeks later. No MFA prompt. No brute force. Just a legitimate session replayed by the wrong person, with real dollar damage through unauthorized usage and credits. We use that story to sharpen the CISSP Domain 5.6 mindset around implementing authentication systems and, more importantly, validating tokens after sign-in. I walk through why authentication and token validation are different security functions with different “owners,” why forcing password resets does not invalidate an attacker’s existing session, and what a token signature does and does not prove. Then we get practical: audience claim checks, expiration and token lifetime ceilings, scope validation, and why “skipping the audience check breaks nothing in testing” is exactly how breaches scale. We also cover the controls that shrink risk when you cannot reliably detect theft: short access token lifetimes, narrow scoping to limit blast radius, hardware-backed signing key storage, and automated key rotation with defined crypto periods. To lock it in, we run through four CISSP-style questions and explain the traps so you can answer like a risk-focused manager, not a spec reciter. Subscribe for more CISSP exam training, share this with a teammate who owns IAM, and leave a review so more candidates can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E371
September 21 · 30 min
CCT 371: Secure Communication Channels and Who Is Really On Your Call (Domain 4.3)
Send us Fan Mail One video hotline feels like a single, simple conversation until you trace the call path and realise there may be seven companies involved in making it work. That’s the spark for this training-focused breakdown of CISSP Domain 4.3 secure communication channels, using the viral AI “actress hotline” story to show how modern voice and video collaboration really behaves behind the curtain. We start with a practical analogy: you think you’re transacting with the waiter, but your meal passes through a hidden chain of people you never met. The same thing happens with telephony, video conferencing, contact centres, telehealth platforms, transcription tools, AI response generation, and cloud infrastructure. Even when every vendor is legitimate, contracted, and disclosed, your security model can fail if it only accounts for the one company you can see. From there, we get concrete about what CISSP candidates are tested on: who can join a call, what services are attached (recording, transcription, analytics), what survives after the call, and where trust boundaries actually sit. We also tackle a classic trap: encryption in transit can stop interception, but it does not prevent authorised intermediaries like transcription providers or model services from decrypting and processing content. Finally, we connect the dots to retention “clocks” and transborder data flows, including how Domain 4 channel design intersects with Domain 1 legal transfer mechanisms and accountability. If you’re studying for the CISSP exam or building a real-world secure communications programme, you’ll leave with a clearer mental model and a set of exam-style questions you can use right away. Subscribe, share this with a fellow CISSP candidate, and leave a review so more security pros can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E370
September 14 · 38 min
CCT 370: CISSP Cryptography, FIPS Validation, and Post-Quantum (Domain 3)
Send us Fan Mail A compliance deadline can change your security posture without changing a single bit of your encryption. We start with a simple sticker-on-the-windshield analogy that maps directly to what’s happening with FIPS 140 validations: your VPN can keep encrypting, your database can keep protecting data, and yet an assessor can still mark you down because “working” is not the same as “validated.” We walk through the practical CISSP Domain 3 lesson behind the noise: the difference between an algorithm claim (we use AES-256), a configuration claim (we run in FIPS mode), and an evidence claim (we hold an active FIPS 140 validation on the CMVP list). With FIPS 140-2 certificates moving to historical status and FIPS 140-3 testing queues stretching beyond 500 days, the manager move is not wishful thinking. It’s documenting the gap, treating it as risk, and getting formal risk acceptance with executive sign-off plus a real remediation plan, especially if you’re facing CMMC or customer security assessments. From there we connect the dots across cryptographic life cycle management, cryptographic agility, and the real places crypto fails: key management and implementation. We cover HSM storage, rotation, dual control versus split knowledge, PKI revocation choices (CRL, OCSP, OCSP stapling), common cryptanalysis categories, and why side-channel and fault-injection attacks hit modules rather than “the math.” We then get clear on quantum risk, harvest now decrypt later, and what NIST’s post-quantum standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) mean for your migration plan starting with a cryptographic inventory. Subscribe for more CISSP exam-ready training, share this with a teammate who owns compliance evidence, and leave a review if it helped. What would fail first in your environment: the crypto itself, or the proof you can show an auditor? Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E369
September 7 · 31 min
CCT 369: Security Models Demystified - CISSP Domain 3.2 (Replay of CCT 278)
Send us Fan Mail 🔁 REPLAY — this episode originally aired as CCT 278 in September 2025. I'm heads-down finishing a Domain 3 cryptography episode, so I'm re-running one of the strongest episodes in the archive rather than shipping something thin. If you're newer to the show, you haven't heard this one. And if you're studying Domain 3 right now the timing works in your favor — security models are the foundation the rest of the domain sits on, and next week's episode picks up in the same domain. New material next Monday. --- Security models represent some of the most difficult concepts for CISSP exam candidates to master, yet they form the foundation of implementing and understanding security controls. This episode breaks down Domain 3.2's security models using plain language and practical examples. The episode opens with analysis of the TransUnion data breach affecting 4.4 million individuals, demonstrating why proper security architecture matters. It then explores the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) — the foundation for secure code — covering key components like the Security Kernel, Reference Monitor, Trusted Path, and TCB Boundary. The core focus examines the eight major security models essential for exam preparation. These include Bell-LaPadula's confidentiality-focused "no read up, no write down" principle, Biba's integrity-centered approach, Clark-Wilson's business integrity enforcement through duty separation, and Brewer-Nash's conflict-of-interest prevention. Additional models addressing specific security concerns are also covered. The episode concludes with exam preparation guidance, highlighting which models deserve priority study attention. ⚠️ Since this is a replay: the TransUnion breach discussed at the top is from 2025. The Domain 3.2 material is unchanged and still current. Ready to stop guessing on Domain 3? Accelerator $19/mo · Pro $39/mo · Sprint Cohort https://www.cisspcybertraining.com Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E368
August 31 · 42 min
CCT 368: CISSP Asset Security and Data Classification (Domain 2)
Send us Fan Mail Nine million images. No password. No encryption. And the defence was basically: “It wasn’t public because you had to know the URL.” That single line opens up one of the most important CISSP Domain 2 conversations you can have: security through obscurity is not access control, and a hidden address is not a key. We take this real data exposure and translate it into the kind of manager-level reasoning the CISSP exam demands, not memorised trivia. We then zoom out into Asset Security fundamentals: identification and inventory, data classification based on impact, and the roles that make controls enforceable. We break down data owner versus custodian, plus controller and processor language you will see in privacy frameworks like GDPR. The core takeaway is simple and painful: without a named owner, nothing downstream is mandatory, so encryption, authentication, retention jobs, and evidence-producing logging keep losing to deadlines. Finally, we turn the incident into practice questions and “spot the trap” exam thinking: accountability does not transfer when you outsource, absent controls are not weak controls, and impact is not likelihood. We also hit retention and destruction across the data lifecycle, including NIST SP 800-88 clearing, purging, and destruction, and where degaussing and crypto erase really belong. Subscribe for more CISSP exam prep with real-world security stories, share this with a study partner, and leave a review if it helps you think more clearly under exam pressure. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E367
August 24 · 42 min
CCT 367: Threat Modeling and the AI Agent That Breached Hugging Face (CISSP Domain 1.10)
Send us Fan Mail A rogue AI agent didn’t “hack the future” so much as exploit the oldest security problems in the book: weak boundaries, over-trusted inputs, exposed endpoints, and credentials lying around. We walk through the Hugging Face intrusion story like a CISO briefing a board, step by step, translating a fast-moving AI-red-team narrative into the kind of clear threat modeling logic you need for ISC2 CISSP Domain 1.10 and for real risk decisions. From there, we shift into training mode and get concrete about threat modeling concepts and methodologies. We define threat modeling the way the exam cares about it: proactive, iterative, and designed to produce security requirements and prioritised countermeasures that feed your SDLC and risk register. We break down the three starting perspectives (asset-centric, attack-centric, and system-centric), then anchor STRIDE to data flow diagrams and trust boundaries so you can identify what security property is actually being violated, not just recite acronyms. We also cover the difference between identifying and ranking threats so you don’t fall into the classic traps: DREAD ranks threats you already found, while PASTA starts with business objectives and risk appetite and is built for risk-centric outputs leaders can fund. We talk attack trees, why MITRE ATT&CK is an input rather than a methodology, and why your threat actor catalog must include authorized non-human identities and vendor integrations that can operate outside intended scope. If this helps, subscribe, share it with a study buddy, and leave a quick review so more CISSP candidates can find it. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E366
August 17 · 33 min
CCT 366: Software Supply Chain Security Explained — CISSP Domain 8 (ChainDrop Case Study)
Send us Fan Mail A supply chain attack that leaves your Git history spotless should change how you think about “secure code.” We walk through ChainDrop, a worm discovered in the NPM ecosystem that poisoned 444 packages while evading the places defenders usually look. The unnerving twist is that it can trigger without a classic npm install and can hide in the space between your repository and the package archive your CI/CD pipeline actually pulls, which is exactly why code review alone can’t be your finish line. From there, we tie the real-world scenario directly to CISSP Domain 8 Software Development Security and the secure SDLC. I lay out a clear, exam-friendly framework for assessing third-party and acquired software risk: Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), vendor and publisher risk assessment, and runtime plus pipeline controls. We talk about why SCA is necessary but incomplete, how a living SBOM enables fast exposure checks when a new campaign hits, and why Executive Order 14028 is pushing SBOM adoption into “expected” territory for many organisations. We also get practical about CI/CD pipeline security: dependency pinning, trusted publishing workflows, signed commits, OIDC, and package signing and verification approaches like Sigstore and Cosign. Finally, we run through scenario-based practice questions that highlight common CISSP traps and the manager mindset the exam rewards. If you want more episodes like this, subscribe, share it with a developer or security lead, and leave a quick review so more CISSP candidates can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E365
August 10 · 25 min
CCT 365: Malicious QR Code Attacks and Digital Forensics Techniques Every CISSP Should Know [REPLAY]
Send us Fan Mail One careless QR scan can quietly turn a “private” chat into a live wiretap. We start with a timely threat story: Russian APT-style actors abusing Signal’s linked device flow by pushing phishing links that contain malicious QR codes, so messages can be mirrored to an attacker device in real time. If you use Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram at work, this is the kind of simple, human-triggered failure mode worth building into your security awareness habits. Then we shift into CISSP Question Thursday with a rapid, practical run through CISSP Domain 7.1 style topics in digital forensics and incident response. We break down what comes first when handling digital evidence (forensic copy before analysis), how to examine a suspicious file without detonating it (static analysis), and what makes an incident report useful under pressure (a clear timeline of events and actions taken). We also cover insider threat artifacts, mobile device forensics tools like Cellebrite UFED, and why chain of custody is the backbone that keeps evidence credible from collection to court. Along the way, we talk about root cause analysis, anomaly-based detection for network traffic, and why clear writing beats big jargon when you’re briefing executives, legal, or a board. If you want exam-ready thinking that also maps to real investigations, you’ll get it here. Subscribe for weekly CISSP training, share this with a teammate who scans QR codes too fast, and leave a review with the topic you want next. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E364
August 3 · 46 min
CCT 364: Third Party Risk Management - How One Vendor Breach Exposed 119,000 Users
Send us Fan Mail A breach can hit your headlines even when your own systems never get touched, and that’s exactly why third-party risk management keeps showing up on the CISSP exam and in real incident reports. We walk through the Vimeo breach tied to its analytics vendor Anodot, where compromised vendor access and authentication tokens gave attackers a clean path to customer data. No video content or payment data was taken, but names, emails, and metadata exposure is still a trust and reputation problem that security teams have to own. From there, we zoom out to the bigger pattern behind modern supply chain security: attackers increasingly go after dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, shared developer tools, and widely used vendors because one compromise can cascade across hundreds of customers. We talk about how to reduce that exposure with a stronger TPRM program, including vendor risk tiering, continuous monitoring, SBOM thinking, and practical contractual controls like breach notification timelines, right to audit language, and clear subcontractor disclosure with flow-down requirements to address fourth-party risk. We also shift into CISSP Domain 1 rapid review mode: what the exam really wants when it asks about due diligence, evidence, and proportional risk decisions. You’ll hear clean explanations of SOC 2 Type 1 vs SOC 2 Type 2, where ISO 27001 fits, why questionnaires like SIG are not proof, and which frameworks matter for third-party and supply chain risk management including NIST 800-161, ISO 27036, and NIST CSF 2.0. We close with practice scenarios that mirror common CISSP traps so you can spot them fast. Subscribe for more CISSP training, share this with a study partner, and leave a review so more security pros can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E363
July 27 · 44 min
CCT 363: CISSP AI Governance - What Credit Union Examiners Are Really Asking
Send us Fan Mail One bad AI decision can cost you more than money. It can cost you trust, trigger regulators overnight, and put your name on the hook when the board asks, “Who approved this?” We dig into AI governance through a CISSP lens, using real-world banking and credit union scenarios that show how fast things go sideways when AI tools slip outside your controls. We start with the uncomfortable reality behind modern AI adoption: vendors ship powerful models, teams connect third parties, and employees reach for whatever chatbot is quickest. From AI-powered lending platforms that promise speed and fairness, to shadow AI that starts with a simple copy paste of customer data, the common thread is the same. Policies are not protection unless you can detect, enforce, and prove what’s happening with data, models, and vendors. Then we get practical. We walk through what examiners and auditors actually look for, why NIST AI RMF and existing third-party risk management rules are becoming the default playbook, and how to build evidence that holds up. Expect clear guidance on independent bias testing, explainability, contract language like right to audit and incident notification SLAs, and why model revalidation must be triggered by material change rather than an annual calendar cycle. We also tie the work back to CISSP domains and run practice questions designed to expose the “easy” answers that fail in real governance. If you’re responsible for security, compliance, or risk, this is your roadmap for governing AI before it governs you. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review so more CISSP candidates and security leaders can find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E362
July 20 · 34 min
CCT 362: Security Assessment Strategies & Abandoned Cloud Storage Risks (CISSP 6.1) - REPLAY
Send us Fan Mail That forgotten cloud storage you stopped thinking about months ago can become a real attack path today. We start with a simple but dangerous scenario: abandoned AWS S3 buckets and other orphaned cloud storage that can be re-registered, repurposed, and used to serve malicious content to systems that still “trust” the old source. We walk through why this turns into a supply chain-style problem, what signals to look for, and the practical mitigations that matter most: proper decommissioning, continuous monitoring, tight access control, and disciplined cloud asset inventories. From there, we shift into CISSP Domain 6.1 and the real work of designing and validating assessment, test, and audit strategies. We explain how we approach building a security assessment and testing program from the ground up: clear objectives, tight scope, risk-based prioritisation, stakeholder alignment, and baselines grounded in frameworks like NIST CSF, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmarks, and NIST SP 800-53. The aim is simple: identify vulnerabilities, validate security controls, and turn findings into remediation that leadership can act on. We also break down core security testing methods you will see on the CISSP and in real organisations: vulnerability assessment, penetration testing (white box, black box, gray box), fuzz testing, SAST and DAST for application security, plus red team, blue team, and purple team collaboration. Finally, we demystify SOC 1 vs SOC 2 and Type 1 vs Type 2 reports, why they matter for third-party risk management, and how cyber resilience thinking (including the Cyber Resiliency Index) ties everything back to continuity and trust. If this helps, subscribe, share the show with a colleague studying CISSP, and leave a review with the topic you want next. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E361
July 13 · 32 min
CCT 361: Bad Epoll - Root Access in 6 Instructions
Send us Fan Mail A six-instruction timing glitch in the Linux kernel can be the difference between “low-priv user” and full root control, and that is why we dig into the Bad EPoll vulnerability from a CISSP-ready, manager-first angle. We start by grounding what the Linux kernel EPoll subsystem does, why it is foundational to high-performance I/O, and why “just disable it” is not a real option when you’re dealing with production Linux servers, desktops, cloud workloads, and Android devices. Then we unpack the security mechanics in clear terms: a use-after-free race condition, an impossibly thin race window, and the way memory corruption turns into privilege escalation. We also talk about what makes this case extra concerning, including the report that it can be triggered from inside Chrome’s rendering sandbox. If you’ve ever relied on sandboxing, kernel boundaries, or “we run scanners” as your safety net, this story forces a more honest view of defense in depth. From there we connect the dots to CISSP Domain 8 software development security and real secure SDLC practice. We walk through where SAST, DAST, fuzzing, KASAN-style instrumentation, and AI-assisted code review help and where they fail, especially for concurrency bugs. The real takeaway is a layered detection strategy: automated testing plus manual secure code review for high-blast-radius code, support for external researchers through bug bounty programmes, and a patch management process that moves in days with verification and regression testing so incomplete fixes do not slip through. If this helps you think like a manager, subscribe, share the episode with a study buddy, and leave a review so more CISSP candidates can find it. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E360
July 6 · 23 min
CCT 360: SSA Whistleblower and the Thumb Drive: What CISSP Asset Security Tells Us About This Disaster
Send us Fan Mail Imagine hearing a claim that the most sensitive identity data in the United States could be sitting on a personal thumb drive. That allegation is still unverified and under investigation, but it gives us a rare chance to see CISSP Domain 2 asset security in real time, with consequences that go far beyond a typical data breach. I walk through what’s being reported about Social Security Administration data access and potential copying, then I put on the Domain 2 lens: data classification and handling requirements, who the true data owner is, what custodians should be enforcing, and how processors should be limited by scope, purpose, and time. We talk about why “high” impact data under FIPS 199 should automatically trigger stricter controls, and how failures in encryption, logging, and data loss prevention can let sensitive datasets slip outside organizational boundaries. We also dig into the part most teams get wrong: the data lifecycle. If you cannot execute secure disposal and verify it, you cannot “close Pandora’s box.” Using NIST SP 800-88, we break down clear, purge, and destroy, connect it to real operational controls like removable media restrictions, and turn the whole story into practical exam guidance and CISO-level program lessons you can use with leadership. Subscribe for more CISSP-ready breakdowns, share this with someone studying Domain 2, and leave a review so more security pros can find the show. What is the first control you would fix in your own environment? Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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S3 · E359
June 29 · 43 min
CCT 359: ShinyHunters vs. Oracle — Supply Chain Risk Every CISSP Must Know
Send us Fan Mail A vendor gets breached and suddenly your perimeter does not matter, because the attacker does not need to “hack” you. They just reuse the access you already approved. That’s the core lesson behind the Shiny Hunters campaign targeting Oracle PeopleSoft servers at colleges and universities, where compromised access led to large-scale theft of student data and a messy, high-impact supply chain incident. We walk through what supply chain security really means for modern cybersecurity and for the CISSP exam: it’s not only the software you buy, but also hardware vendors, cloud service providers, managed service providers, open source libraries, and contractors with privileged access. I break down the four supply chain attack vectors you need to know cold: compromised credentials and OAuth tokens, malicious code injection in CI/CD pipelines, open source package attacks like typosquatting and maintainer compromise, and hardware tampering. Along the way, we map the ideas to CISSP Domains 1, 3, 5, and 8 so you can answer questions like a manager, not just a technician. Then we go deeper on two concepts that keep showing up in both real breaches and exam questions. First, SBOM (Software Bill of Materials), the “nutrition label” that tells you exactly what’s inside your software so you can respond fast when a new CVE hits. Second, OAuth token governance, where long-lived or overly broad tokens can become silent master keys if you do not scope, expire, inventory, revoke, and monitor them properly. We finish with three practice questions and the reasoning behind the best answers and the common distractors. If this helps, subscribe so you do not miss the next training, share the episode with a CISSP study partner, and leave a review to help more security pros find the show. Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
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