Plaintext with Rich

A routine software update. No phishing. No sketchy download. Then a security team finds the unthinkable: trusted code has been hijacked, and the breach rode in through the exact channels engineers rely on every day. I walk through the supply chain attacks that piled up across April and May 2026, including poisoned open source packages tied to TanStack and trojanized Daemon Tools installers, plus the rapid-fire abuse of major software registries like NPM, PyPI, and Docker Hub. The most ...

You finish at 6:00pm. At 6:47 you reopen the laptop, 'just to check something.' By 9:00 the evening is gone. The boundary didn't fail tonight. It was never there. Episode 27 of Plaintext with Rich closes the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on self-care for people working in security and tech. This week we're talking about work-life balance, but not as willpower or time management. As protective infrastructure. We pull the arc together, mental, spiritual, physical, and burnout, and la...

It's Friday morning. You stand up to refill your water and your back doesn’t move the way it used to. The systems are up and running smoothly. Your body hasn’t gotten the same memo. Episode 25 of Plaintext with Rich is the third installment of the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on self-care for people working in security and tech. This week we’re talking about physical health, the silent receipt your body keeps for the cumulative load of this job. We get into the specific body costs...

It's 6:47 a.m. The incident was contained hours ago. The systems are fine. You're the one still running hot. This episode opens the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week Plaintext with Rich series on mental health, spiritual health, physical health, burnout, and work-life balance for people working in cybersecurity and tech. May 1 happens to fall during Mental Health Awareness Month, which makes it the right time to start. We're talking about the mental load that comes with vigilance work: on-cal...

The fighter absorbs hits up front. The rogue finds traps before the party walks into them. The cleric keeps everyone alive when things go wrong. And the bard convinces the people with resources to actually fund the quest. Nobody does everything. Everybody has a role. Now replace the dungeon with your company's network. This episode maps cybersecurity roles to D&D character classes, SOC analysts as fighters, pen testers as rogues, incident response as clerics, security architects as wizard...

Someone sits down at a keyboard, mashes keys for six seconds, and says "I'm in." Every security professional dies a little inside but that scene is probably the reason half of us got into this field. This episode walks through the movies, TV shows, books, graphic novels, and video games that shaped how we think about cybersecurity. Each pick lands in one of two buckets: the fantastical, the ones that made hacking look cool even when the tech was nonsense and the accurate or semi accurate, the...

You tap a button and a ride shows up. You check out online and your bank approves it in seconds. It feels automatic. But nothing in software is automatic. Something received a request, decided it was valid, did some work, and sent back a response. That something is an API. This episode breaks down what APIs actually are, why they exist, when to use them, and why they matter far more than most people realize. It starts with a restaurant analogy that makes the concept click, then walks through ...

Every company says they're using AI. Some mean chatbots. Some mean automation. Some mean statistics with a new logo. If everything is AI, the word stops meaning anything. This episode untangles what people actually mean when they say "AI" by breaking the umbrella into its real components. It covers machine learning (systems that learn patterns from data), deep learning (layered neural networks that made modern recognition possible), large language models (text prediction engines driving today...

The breach didn't come through a broken firewall. It walked in through a valid login. Nothing exploded. Nothing looked suspicious at first. Someone just signed in and kept going. This episode clears up what Zero Trust actually is and what it isn't. It's not a product, not a box you install, and not a technology you turn on. It's a design decision: don't automatically believe a request just because it comes from inside your network. The episode explains why the old perimeter model stopped work...

You don't need to break a system if someone will open it for you. You don't need malware if a message feels urgent enough. Most modern breaches don't start with code. They start with a conversation. This episode breaks down phishing and social engineering by explaining why these attacks keep working: they don't fight logic, they sidestep it. It covers how modern phishing has evolved beyond email to include text messages, voice calls, MFA fatigue attacks, QR code phishing, and AI-assisted impe...

Your house didn't suddenly become unsafe. It just became chatty. Little devices, quietly talking to the internet, all day, all night. Most of them were never meant to be guarded. This episode explains IoT security by starting with a translation: if a device needs an app to work and Wi-Fi to exist, it's a computer with software, memory, and network access, and computers inherit risk. It covers why manufacturers optimize for convenience over long-term protection, how most IoT compromises happen...

You don't lose access to an account because someone knows your name. You lose access because they reused something you were told to keep secret. For years, the internet has worked on copying secrets and then acting surprised when copies escape. This episode breaks down passwordless authentication and passkeys, explaining why the shift away from typed passwords isn't innovation hype but an industry admission that shared secrets have become a liability. It covers what passkeys actually are (cry...

When your data is taken, it doesn't fall into a void. It moves. It gets packaged. It gets priced. And while you're changing a password, someone else is deciding how many times they can reuse your name. This episode strips away the mythology around the dark web and explains what it actually is: a part of the internet designed for anonymity that doubles as a wholesale market for stolen data. It covers how credentials are bundled and priced, why medical records cost more than credit cards, and h...