Bare Metal Cyber

In this episode, we break down the reality of the SOC Pager Olympics—the endless cycle of 3 a.m. wake-ups triggered by false alarms. You’ll hear how misconfigured thresholds, duplication storms, and phantom anomalies turn vigilance into chaos. We’ll explore the human cost of sleep disruption, from cognitive fog to burnout, and reveal why culture and leadership are just as critical as detection rules. Along the way, you’ll learn how to separate signals from noise, define what truly deserves a page, and restore trust in the systems meant to protect.By listening, you’ll sharpen your ability to design sustainable on-call practices, strengthen detection engineering skills, and build empathy-driven leadership that respects human limits. You’ll also gain practical tools for measuring alert quality, enriching notifications with context, and fostering psychological safety in SOC teams. This is more than an exploration of alert fatigue—it’s a roadmap to building stronger, healthier defenders.Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

When your network still feels like one big open floor plan, a single compromised device can turn into a building-wide fire. In this audio companion to my Tuesday “Insights” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, we walk through network segmentation in clear, practical language. You’ll hear what network segmentation really is, where it fits in modern hybrid environments, and how it changes the way traffic moves between users, servers, and sensitive systems. The goal is not theory for its own sake, but a working mental model you can carry into your next design review, incident call, or architecture conversation.We also explore how segmentation patterns show up in everyday environments, from simple user-versus-server separations to tighter zones around high-value applications and data. Along the way, we look at the benefits and trade-offs, including the design effort, operational overhead, and hard limits segmentation cannot solve on its own. You’ll hear common failure modes like “any-to-any” rules and rule sprawl, as well as healthy signals that your segmentation is actually slowing attackers down. If you work in security, IT, or cloud operations, this walkthrough gives you a straight-talking guide to making flat networks more defensible.

This episode walks you through the PCI Professional (PCIP) certification in clear, everyday language. We start with what PCIP is designed to prove, why it matters for anyone working around payment card data, and how it fits into the wider world of PCI DSS. From there, we talk about who this certification is really for across security, IT, audit, and payments roles, and what it means to be able to “speak PCI” in meetings, projects, and assessments. The narration is based on my Monday “Certified” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, adapted for audio so you can follow along without needing the article in front of you. You will also get a guided tour of what the PCIP exam actually tests, the kinds of scenarios you can expect, and how the certification fits into a longer-term career path that might include other security, audit, or compliance credentials. We connect domains, scope, controls, and evidence in a way that makes sense if you are early in your journey but already working with real systems and teams. If you want to go further, you can dive into the full PCI Professional (PCIP) audio course inside the Bare Metal Cyber Audio Academy for deeper, structured exam prep.

In this episode, we strip away the noise surrounding Software Bills of Materials and reframe them through a fresh lens: allergens. Instead of drowning in endless dependency lists, you’ll learn how to identify the handful of components that can actually break your security posture—known exploited vulnerabilities, crypto and authentication stacks, choke-point libraries, abandoned projects, legal traps, and poisoned registries. We explore how VEX, exploit likelihood, and reachability shrink the noise, and we break down the concept of the minimal-viable SBOM, a leaner approach designed to deliver clarity instead of compliance fatigue.By listening, you’ll sharpen your ability to prioritize real risks over theoretical ones, master how to integrate context like VEX into security workflows, and recognize legal and build-system obligations before they cause damage. You’ll walk away with practical skills for producing SBOMs people will actually use, crafting reports tailored to different audiences, and focusing on trust-building clarity rather than overwhelming volume. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

In this narrated Insight, we unpack cyber asset inventory as the quiet backbone of a modern security program. You will hear what cyber asset inventory really means in today’s mix of on-prem, cloud, and SaaS, and where it fits among your existing tools and processes. We walk through why “you can’t secure what you can’t see” is not just a slogan, but a practical reality for vulnerability management, access reviews, and incident response. The narration is based on my Tuesday “Insights” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, adapted into clear, spoken explanations for busy security and IT professionals.We also explore how a living asset map actually comes together, from discovery sources and central stores to ownership tags and enrichment rules. You will hear everyday use cases that range from quick wins, like building a simple view of internet-facing assets, to more strategic moves like mapping assets to business services. Along the way, we call out the real benefits, trade-offs, and limits of cyber asset inventory, plus the failure modes that cause inventories to decay and the healthy signals that show the discipline is working in real life.