California election counting has confused — and frankly ticked off — a lot of people, and I get it. I'm W. Curtis Preston, I've worked every California election since the 2016 presidential primary, and I've managed the polls at multiple elections here in San Diego County. This episode, I'm going solo to explain exactly what's going on, why it takes so long, what the "red mirage" actually is, and why none of it is fraud. Sorry to disappoint some of you.

If you've ever had a family member call you asking "what the hell is going on over there?" — this one's for you. I walk through the specific changes California made to election law, how our system compares to Florida's, why human nature is a big part of the problem, and what the chain of custody for every single ballot actually looks like from the inside. This isn't punditry. This is someone who has stood at those poll books, sealed those ballot cartons, and escorted those ballots to the DART team.

Chapters:

0:00 – Introduction: What the hell is going on in California?

1:23 – Who I am and why I can speak to this

2:12 – How California election law changed six years ago

4:43 – The mail ballot window: postmark by 8 PM, received within 7 days

5:09 – Vote centers vs. the old precinct model

7:39 – California vs. Florida: why the laws produce such different results

9:09 – Why California voters wait until the last minute

14:12 – The red mirage explained: it's not fraud, it's math

15:31 – Signature verification: 80,000–100,000 per day in San Diego alone

16:35 – How computers count ballots — and the 1% manual audit that checks them

19:11 – Chain of custody: two people, sealed cartons, tracked numbers

20:17 – Debunking the "law enforcement can't observe" myth

21:24 – Dead people voting? Let's talk about what's actually happening

22:47 – Wrap-up

Basic cyber hygiene — patch management, password management, and MFA — is responsible for stopping roughly 90% of the ransomware attacks that could hit your organization. This episode is the overview: what those three things are, why they matter, and what happens when you skip them.

WannaCry infected over 200,000 systems worldwide. A patch existed. People just hadn't applied it. Rackspace lost an entire business line — not because the attack was sophisticated, but because a workaround gave them false confidence and they delayed a critical patch. These aren't edge cases. They're the rule.

Dr. Mike Saylor (Black Swan Cybersecurity) and Prasanna Malaiyandi join me to walk through the three pillars of basic cyber hygiene. We cover patch management first — and before you can even patch, you have to know what you have. Inventory is the starting point. Then we get into passwords: why reusing them is a numbers game the bad guys always win, and why a password manager isn't optional anymore. Finally, MFA — what it is, which forms are actually worth using, and why "remember this device" is quietly defeating the whole point.

This is an overview episode. We're going deeper on each pillar in three follow-up episodes. But if you're not doing these three things today, stop reading this and go do them. There's no point talking about EDR, XDR, or any other three-letter security product if you haven't nailed the basics first. It's like researching a Roth IRA when you don't have a savings account.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

0:59 Welcome & Introductions

4:20 WannaCry: The Patch That Would Have Saved 200,000 Systems

7:33 Rackspace: When a Workaround Isn't Enough

12:12 Defining Basic Cyber Hygiene

14:53 Why These Three Things Stop 90% of Ransomware

17:54 Pillar 1: Patch Management

23:55 Pillar 2: Password Management

31:55 Pillar 3: MFA & Passkeys

37:34 Wrap-Up & What's Next

Claude deletes a company — and the internet immediately blamed the AI. But this story is really about backup design, credential management, and least privilege. An AI coding agent running Claude via Cursor deleted PocketOS's entire production database and all its backups in nine seconds. One bad design decision at a time, a startup built itself a disaster waiting to happen. Claude just happened to be the thing that set it off.

Here's what you need to understand: the AI violated the principles it was given, and that's on Claude. But Claude never should have had access to do what it did. Credentials were sitting in a plain text YAML file. The production database and its backups lived on the same volume. No least privilege. No expiration on elevated permissions. And almost certainly, no backup recovery test — ever.

In this episode, Curtis and Prasanna break down what actually went wrong with PocketOS, what Railway did to help recover the data, and what you need to do to make sure this never happens to you. Topics covered include backup isolation, the 3-2-1 rule, secrets management tools like AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault, least privilege access, permission expiration, and credential scanning tools like TruffleHog.

Chapters:

0:00 — Intro: Meet the villain

1:50 — Welcome and introducing "the French friend"

3:48 — What Claude actually did to PocketOS

7:20 — This is a backup story, not an AI story

9:27 — The recovery: Railway, a weekend of chaos, and a lucky Twitter post

12:31 — Your data is your responsibility — not your vendor's

17:48 — Rule #1: Never store backups inside production

20:37 — The real problem: credential management

23:38 — Secrets management tools explained

25:21 — Least privilege and why permissions need expiration dates

34:59 — Finding exposed credentials with TruffleHog

37:24 — Summary and takeaways

Honeypots and canary files are two of the most underused tools in cybersecurity — and in this episode, Dr. Mike Saylor and I break down exactly how they work and why you should be using them. The short version: they're tripwires. They tell you a bad guy is poking around your network before anything gets encrypted.

Mike walks through his layered security analogy, explains the three different ways organizations use honeypots — learning attacker tactics, distraction, and testing — and then we get into canary files: what makes them different from a honeypot, how they beacon home when stolen, and why clock synchronization matters more than most people think if you ever want that evidence to hold up.

We also cover how to stand one up without a big budget, what tools are available, and why something is absolutely better than nothing. Plus, Mike and I have news about our new O'Reilly book, Learning Ransomware Response and Recovery.

0:00 - Intro and book news

1:09 - Meet the crew

3:45 - Security is all about layers

9:22 - What are honeypots and canary files?

11:00 - Three ways honeypots work for you

13:17 - Real-world examples: bait cars and glitter bombs

15:20 - Making your honeypot convincing

19:11 - Honeypot tools and options

21:13 - Something is better than nothing

24:10 - Monitoring and notifications

25:05 - Canary files explained

27:03 - How canary files beacon and track attackers

28:03 - Don't forget to sync your clocks

29:05 - Final thoughts

Network segmentation to prevent ransomware isn't just a nice-to-have — the UCSF ransomware attack proves it's what separates a contained incident from a catastrophe. UCSF got hit. Their segmented network kept the damage from spreading across their entire operation. That's the difference we're talking about in this episode.

Dr. Mike Saylor — my co-author on Learning Ransomware Response and Recovery — joins me and Prasanna to break down exactly how network segmentation works, why it matters for ransomware defense, and how to start doing it without breaking everything in the process. (Not that I've ever done that. Much.)

We cover what segmentation actually is, how VLANs make it manageable, the "need to talk" principle, and where microsegmentation fits in — and when it becomes overkill. We also get into the complexity trap: more rules and more layers don't automatically mean more protection. Sometimes they mean nobody can troubleshoot anything when the house is on fire.

If you're an IT admin trying to make the case for better network architecture, or you just want to understand what would actually stop ransomware from ripping through your environment, this is the episode.

Chapters:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:01:40 — Welcome & Guest Introductions

00:05:17 — Case Study: UCSF Ransomware Attack

00:08:13 — What Is Network Segmentation?

00:12:32 — VLANs Explained

00:19:50 — The Need to Talk Principle

00:30:54 — Complexity vs. Security

00:31:09 — Microsegmentation

00:38:55 — Action Items: Where to Start

00:42:05 — Monitoring VLAN Traffic

Stop Using VSS as a Backup Before Ransomware Deletes Your Shadow Copies

Ransomware deletes shadow copies using your own built-in Windows tools against you — and if VSS was your backup plan, you just found out the hard way that it wasn't. In this episode, W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup), Prasanna Malaiyandi, and Dr. Mike Saylor break down exactly what shadow copies are, why they don't qualify as a real backup, and how attackers are weaponizing vssadmin to wipe your recovery options before you even know you're under attack.

If you've got Windows systems and you've been thinking "eh, we've got shadow copies," this episode is for you. We cover the history of VSS — what it was actually designed for, why it became a crutch, and why using it as your primary backup strategy is a bad idea on multiple levels. Performance, the 3-2-1 rule, and the fact that one attacker with admin rights can delete every single copy in seconds. We also get into the living off the land angle: how attackers do recon on your shadow copies, how they use them to scope out valuable data before going full ransomware, and what you can actually do to detect and respond to this behavior using EDR tools.

The bottom line: VSS is a great tool. It was just never meant to be your backup. Get a real one.

Chapters:

0:00 — Intro

1:39 — Welcome & Book Talk

3:26 — What Are Shadow Copies and Why Do People Use Them as Backups?

9:14 — Performance Problems with VSS as a Backup

10:19 — Living Off the Land: How Ransomware Uses VSS Against You

12:36 — Can You Monitor or Lock Down VSS Admin?

14:26 — Why Shadow Copies Fail the 3-2-1 Rule (They're Not a Backup)

18:01 — How to Protect Yourself: Configuring Your EDR

21:31 — The Local Admin Problem and Security Culture

27:00 — Virtualization, Snapshots, and Shadow Copies

29:00 — Final Thoughts: Just Don't Do That

Ransomware sanctions are something most companies never think about — until they're staring down a ransom demand from a group the US government has already put on a sanctions list. In this episode, Dr. Mike Saylor walks us through a real incident involving a construction company, hundreds of millions in active contracts, and the Lazarus Group — a North Korean state-sponsored threat actor. Before that company could pay a single dollar in ransom, they had to figure out whether doing so would trigger federal penalties that dwarfed the ransom itself. We're talking fines of 10x to 100x the payment amount, and in some jurisdictions, jail time.

This is one of those episodes where the story alone is worth your time. Mike was in the room for this incident, negotiating directly with the Lazarus Group over a weekend — and yes, it turns out North Korean cybercriminals have a surprisingly functional help desk. But beyond the story, there's real actionable information here about OFAC (the Office of Foreign Asset Control), how the US Treasury tracks Bitcoin wallets to identify sanctioned actors, and what you actually need to do the moment ransomware hits your organization.

We also get into why paying a ransom paints a target on your back — 70% of companies that pay get hit again within six months — and why immutable backups are the only thing that truly keeps you out of this situation.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

1:31 Meet the Guests: Curtis, Prasanna, and Dr. Mike Saylor

4:10 Case Study: A Construction Company and the Lazarus Group

6:34 Are These Bad Guys Sanctioned? Introducing OFAC

8:05 Why Ransomware Funds Terrorism, Drug Trafficking, and Worse

11:00 Sanctions Penalties: Fines That Can Put You Out of Business

12:24 Colonial Pipeline and Exceptions for Critical Infrastructure

13:26 How the Government Tracks Bitcoin Wallets

16:27 Global Sanctions: UK and Australia Have Their Own Rules

18:31 Pay Once, Pay Again: The 70% Re-Attack Rate

20:43 Proof of Life: Don't Pay Without It

23:38 What To Do When You Get Hit: The Right Order of Operations

25:17 Immutable Backups: The Only Real Answer

27:07 How the Construction Company's Backups Got Wiped

33:07 Build Your Team Before the Bad Day: FBI InfraGard and More

The cost of a ransomware attack goes way beyond the ransom itself — and most organizations don't find that out until it's too late. In this episode of The Backup Wrap-up, W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and co-host Prasanna Malaiyandi sit down with Dr. Mike Saylor of Black Swan Cybersecurity to walk through every category of cost that hits when ransomware strikes.

The case that kicks everything off: UVM Health Network, October 2020. Over 1,300 servers encrypted, staff forced back to paper records, patient care disrupted for weeks. Total tab? Over $63 million — and they never paid the ransom.

From there, we go category by category: people costs (overtime, third-party IR firms, emergency hardware), lost business revenue, regulatory fines, reputational damage that doesn't wash off, staff burnout and resignations, supply chain chaos, payment processor shutdowns, and cyber insurance fine print that can leave you holding the bag even when you think you're covered.

We also cover what you should be doing right now — before any of this happens to you. Starting with a Business Impact Analysis, which Mike argues most small-to-medium businesses can knock out in one to three weeks. Knowing what a downed system costs you per hour is exactly the information that gets you budget from leadership and a plan that actually works when the feces hits the rotary oscillator.

Chapters:

00:01:44 - Intro & Welcome

00:03:45 - Case Study: UVM Health Network ($63M, 1,300 Servers Down)

00:07:12 - People Costs: Overtime, Staffing & Third-Party IR Firms

00:10:01 - The Odds Are Damn Near 100% — Set Up Your IR Relationship Now

00:13:00 - Hardware Costs & Emergency Spending

00:14:05 - Lost Business Revenue (Current and Future)

00:15:14 - The Stat That Should Scare You: Over 50% Don't Survive

00:16:38 - Regulatory Fines (GDPR, California & More)

00:19:32 - Reputational Damage: Your Customers Never Forget

00:21:28 - Staff Burnout, Exhaustion & Resignations

00:22:40 - Supply Chain Disruption & Credit Rating Impact

00:24:07 - Payment Processor Shutdown (Real Case: Dental Practice)

00:26:00 - Cyber Insurance: Fine Print, Claim Denials & Premium Spikes

00:27:52 - Post-Attack Process Remediation Costs

00:29:36 - Business Impact Analysis: Why You Need One Before It Happens

00:35:00 - Action Items

00:39:41 - Recovery Prioritization & Recovery Point Objectives

00:44:43 - Wrap