What does a device shaped like a 90s pager have to do with the Wi-Fi network your laptop joined at Starbucks last month? In this episode of The Audit, Joshua Schmidt, Eric Brown, and Nick Mellem are joined by IT Audit Labs' own Cameron Birkland to get hands-on with the Hak5 Wi-Fi Pineapple Pager, the newest tool in the Pineapple lineup. Before the gear comes out, the crew unpacks a nine-year-old who ran up $118,000 in YouTube ads on his dad's saved work credit card, how Chrome sync quietly blends work and personal accounts, and new research showing LG smart TVs listening and collecting data even when they appear to be off.

Cameron walks through what the Pineapple Pager does right out of the box, from passive recon and handshake capture to Wi-Fi 6E support and the reality that WPA3 has made many classic attacks far harder to pull off. Eric explains how probe requests let a rogue device impersonate your home or office network to set up a man-in-the-middle attack, shares what he captured at the Minnesota State Fair, and the team talks through war driving with GPS and WiGLE and how these demos land in security awareness training. The episode wraps with the debut of a new segment, Eric Reacts, featuring a pilot's breakdown of a gnarly crosswind landing.

In this episode:

• The Wi-Fi Pineapple Pager runs recon by default and supports Wi-Fi 6E, though WPA3 networks remain out of reach for today's Wi-Fi pen testing tools.

• Eric explains how your devices call out for saved networks and how a rogue access point answers back to launch evil twin and man-in-the-middle attacks.

• War driving in 2026 comes to life with GPS modules, WiGLE integration, and everything a pocket-sized device picked up in one afternoon at the state fair.

• New findings show LG smart TVs listening and collecting data through automatic content recognition, which helps explain why TV prices stay so low.

• A $118,000 ad bill shows what happens when Chrome sync blends work and personal accounts and kids share a browser with a company credit card.

If you've ever connected to public Wi-Fi without a second thought, this one is worth sharing with your team. Like, share, and subscribe for more of the discussions shaping the future of cybersecurity and IT.

#PineapplePager #Hak5 #WiFiHacking #Cybersecurity #EthicalHacking #WarDriving #WPA3 #SmartTVPrivacy #InfoSec #PenTesting

Nation states are paying top dollar for zero day vulnerabilities, hackers went from an empty lab to domain admin in under four hours, and Nvidia's CEO says we just crossed into AGI. On this episode of The Audit, Joshua Schmidt, Eric Brown, and Nick Mellem break down the cybersecurity stories shaping the week and dig into a debate that has no clean answer.

The crew opens with news that Eric Brown has a book on the way, built around lessons learned managing technology for clients over the years, before moving into Patch Tuesday, a PaperCut vulnerability that AI agents used to hack hundreds of organizations in seconds, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's claim that artificial intelligence has already crossed into AGI territory. The conversation closes with an ancient parable about a fireman, and what it teaches modern IT teams about the habits they reward.

In this episode:

• Eric Brown's upcoming book workshops potential titles for his book on fixing the managed service provider model.
• Patch Tuesday and zero days explained, covering what Microsoft's monthly patch cycle fixes and why a zero day can be worth a fortune to a nation state.
• The PaperCut breach and printer security, where an AI powered attack hit 395 organizations through a PaperCut flaw, echoing printer security nightmares the crew has seen during audits and pen tests.
• Have we already reached AGI, with Jensen Huang saying yes and Sam Altman calling the term meaningless, as the crew works through the paperclip dilemma and an AI sandbox experiment.
• The Fireman's Paradox, a centuries old parable about ignoring good advice and what it says about why organizations keep rewarding firefighting instead of prevention.

If this episode gave you something to think about, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Like, share, and subscribe for more of the discussions shaping the future of cybersecurity and IT.

#PatchTuesday #ZeroDay #Cybersecurity #AGI #PaperCut #ITAudit #InfoSec #AIThreats #Podcast #ITAuditLabs

What happens when nation-state hackers target the water coming out of your tap? In this episode of The Audit, Joshua Schmidt, Eric Brown, and Nick Mellem break down the recent wave of attacks on water utilities across Minnesota and 27 other states, where threat actors got their hands on administrative passwords to programmable logic controllers. The crew is joined for the first time by Kelly Venzke, Director of Business Operations at IT Audit Labs, who brings a business leadership perspective to a conversation that quickly turns technical.

From there, Eric and Nick trace how these attacks echo the Stuxnet playbook used against Iran's nuclear program, explain how threat actors are impersonating help desk staff over Microsoft Teams to gain remote access, and dig into a blockchain-based command and control technique that hides inside paid search ads. The conversation wraps with practical advice on browser security, including why isolating AI browser extensions and ditching saved passwords in the browser matters more than most people realize.

In this episode:

• Nation-state hackers breach US water utilities across 27 states. How Iranian threat actors obtained administrative access to programmable logic controllers and why Minnesota may have been ground zero.
• The Stuxnet connection. Eric breaks down how the historic attack on Iran's nuclear centrifuges bridged an air-gapped network, and why today's "air-gapped" systems often aren't as isolated as they seem.
• Help desk impersonation over Microsoft Teams. Why blocking external Teams-to-Teams calls has become a critical defense against social engineering attacks targeting employees.
• EtherHiding: blockchain-backed command and control. How attackers use paid search ads and blockchain infrastructure to maintain persistent, hard-to-detect access to compromised environments.

Practical browser security tips. Kelly, Eric, and Nick talk through password managers, isolating LLM browser extensions, and why saving passwords in your browser is a bad habit worth breaking.

Don't wait until your organization is the next headline. Like, share, and subscribe for more conversations on the threats shaping cybersecurity and IT today.

#Cybersecurity #InfoSec #NationStateThreat #CriticalInfrastructure #WaterSecurity #APT #EtherHiding #BrowserSecurity #ITAudit #Stuxnet