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.

Don’t wait to learn the fire drill while the building’s on fire. In this Cyber Talk developed by BareMetalCyber.com, Army veteran and cyber resilience strategist Daniel Hammond shows how to move past check-the-box drills and turn exercises into a core learning culture. He walks through goal-driven planning (so every exercise serves a sponsor’s real need), the HSEEP spectrum from seminars and workshops to tabletops, drills, and full-scale events, plus when to go operations-based, run no-notice tests, and invite regulators, comms, and third-party partners into the room.

Daniel shares hard-won lessons from building programs at Fortune 500s: validating response playbooks, avoiding “single-layer defense” with purple teaming, closing gaps regulators spot across your industry, and using board briefings to turn findings into funding. If you lead incident response, risk, or compliance—and you want confident teams that discover blind spots before adversaries do—this talk is for you. Join us, bring questions, and leave with practical patterns you can run this quarter.