Autonomous IT

Hosted by Automox

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226

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Aug 2026

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Go from monotonous to autonomous IT operations with this series. Hosts from Automox, the IT automation platform for modern organizations, will cover the latest IT trends; Patch Tuesday remediations; ways to save time with Worklets (pre-built scripts); reduce risk; slash complexity; and automate OS, third-party, and configuration updates on all your Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints. Automate confidence everywhere with Automox.

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August 11, 2026Episode 3522 min

Patch [FIX] Tuesday – [Race Conditions, Registry Hives, and Cloud CVEs], Ep. 35

August 2026 delivers the second-largest Patch Tuesday on record with nearly 400 CVEs, and Landon Miles, Jason Kikta, and Serena DiPenti sort out which ones actually matter. They start with the only actively exploited vulnerability of the month, CVE-2026-68820, a use-after-free in the Windows AFD driver that trades a race condition for SYSTEM privileges. Serena breaks down CVE-2026-62832, a User Profile Service privilege escalation that lets an attacker load another user's registry hive with no user interaction required.Then there's the perfect 10.0 in Microsoft Teams that nobody needs to patch. Jason explains how cloud CVEs ended up in Patch Tuesday releases, why a third of this month's critical count requires zero customer action, and why the industry needs a separate disclosure mechanism before monthly CVE volume becomes pure noise. The crew also covers an ugly macOS screen sharing vulnerability that allowed authentication without credentials, the Linux kernel community's shift to issuing CVEs at scale, fresh takes from Black Hat and DEF CON on AI-driven vulnerability discovery, and why frontier models are forcing patching decisions to happen by policy instead of one CVE at a time.Patch your stuff. See you next month.

July 22, 2026Episode 2217 min

Secure IT – PKI, Certificates, and What Breaks When Trust Fails, E22

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) underpins nearly every secure interaction in modern IT, but it's also one of the most misunderstood and overlooked foundations of security.In this episode of Secure IT, host Jason Kikta is joined by Mark Cooper, CEO and founder of PKI Solutions, to unpack why PKI is so critical to identity, authentication, and trust, and what happens when it fails.They explore how certificates enable passwordless authentication, secure TLS connections, IoT devices, endpoints, and enterprise systems, while also examining why misconfigured or poorly monitored PKI environments often become an attacker's fastest path to privilege escalation. From certificate expirations and operational outages to real-world breach scenarios and pen test failures, this conversation maps the full PKI risk spectrum.Jason and Mark also challenge a common assumption in cybersecurity: that recovery equals resilience. Instead, they argue that true resilience means staying secure and operational, even during misconfiguration, failure, or attack.Whether you're new to PKI or responsible for running it, this episode will change how you think about identity infrastructure, resilience, and trust.Topics covered:- What PKI is and why most organizations already depend on it- Certificates, passwordless authentication, and digital identity- How PKI misconfigurations enable high-impact attacks- Why recovery is the weakest form of resilience- The hidden operational and security risks of foundational systems

July 14, 2026Episode 3429 min

Patch [FIX] Tuesday – [The 570-CVE Month], Ep. 34

570 vulnerabilities. That's July's Patch Tuesday count, nearly triple last month and a record by a wide margin. Jason Kikta is joined by host Landon Miles and offensive-security researcher Serena DiPenti for the July 2026 rundown:An Active Directory Federation Services bug (CVE-2026-56155) already exploited in the wild, rated a deceptively low 7.8A 9.8 DHCP client flaw (CVE-2026-49181) that reaches every Windows endpoint on the networkAn RDP bug you can shut down with a single setting, no patch requiredA SharePoint deserialization flaw (CVE-2026-50522) reachable by anyone with site-owner accessA 9.9 Hyper-V escape that lets one compromised VM take the whole hostA BitLocker bypass (6.1) worth knowing if you manage laptops in the fieldPlus why hacker summer camp turns every July into a bug dump, and what a 570-CVE release says about how much AI is really driving vulnerability discovery.

July 1, 2026Episode 715 min

Executive IT – What IT hiring actually looks like when AI does the work, E07

Eighteen months after the Hands-On IT podcast tackled the state of IT careers, Chelsea Rickey, SVP of Human Resources at Automox, comes back to the conversation to assess what held up, what changed, and what nobody quite predicted.AI is no longer a future-state problem. It's already reshaping what roles look like, how productivity gets measured, and how organizations coordinate. Individual learning agility still matters, but Chelsea argues the harder question now is whether organizations can adapt as fast as the people inside them.

June 11, 2026Episode 2627 min

Product Talk – CISA's BOD 26-04 Directive Explained, E26

CISA's BOD 26-04 replaces severity-based patching with an exploit-evidence model and remediation clocks as short as three days, fleet-wide, no exceptions. Peter Pflaster and Jason Kikta unpack the four urgency signals, the 16-row decision tree, and the shift from "justify the patch" to "justify why you can't." They also cover what it means for contractors, cyber insurance, and the future of Patch Tuesday. If you own patching or vulnerability management, start here.

June 9, 2026Episode 3323 min

Patch [FIX] Tuesday – [Nothing Weaponized, Everything Exposed], E33

June 2026 has no headliner. Instead of one critical bug, the release spreads thin across the kernel, the network stack, a code editor, an AI assistant, a bootloader, and a nine-year-old Linux root bug. It's a breadth problem, not a severity one, and it changes how you triage.Jason Kikta and Landon Miles break down the whole release, then step off the patch list for the breaches that never got a CVE: GitHub's internal repos reached through a poisoned VS Code extension, a TanStack compromise carrying valid SLSA provenance, and a Red Hat npm namespace compromise that fired the moment anyone ran npm install.

May 12, 2026Episode 3234 min

Patch [FIX] Tuesday – [AI Hits the Hat Trick], Ep. 32

The May 2026 Microsoft Patch Tuesday release looks quiet on the surface – no actively exploited zero-days, no public disclosures at release, and a CVE count below the four-month average. Don't let that fool you.In this episode, Jason Kikta and Landon Miles break down everything that happened between April and May patch cycles, including Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.5 release with 79 CVEs, the Dirty Frag Linux kernel privilege escalation chain, and two pre-authenticated network remote code execution vulnerabilities in Windows core services that belong at the top of your patch list.They also dig into one of the month's most significant trends: AI-assisted vulnerability research showing up by name in Microsoft, Apple, and Linux acknowledgments in the same patch cycle – including Anthropic researchers credited on a critical Windows graphics component RCE. Ten AI-attributed vulnerability discoveries shipped fixes across all three major operating systems this month.What's covered:CVE-2026-41089: Windows NetLogon RCE (CVSS 9.8) and CVE-2026-41096: Windows DNS Client RCE (CVSS 9.8)CVE-2026-40402: Hyper-V guest-to-host escalation (CVSS 9.3)macOS Tahoe 26.5: Wi-Fi kernel RCE, nine kernel CVEs, 20 WebKit vulnerabilitiesDirty Frag Linux privilege escalation chain and the Copy Fail connectionAI-credited discoveries from Anthropic, calif.io, Theori, and NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation- Patch Tuesday Blog- DirtyFrag Blog- What "Mythos Ready" Means

May 8, 2026Episode 3110 min

Patch [FIX] Tuesday – [Emergency Episode: DirtyFrag Exploit Before Patch], Ep. 31

Breaking from the normal Patch Tuesday cadence for an emergency drop. On May 7, security researcher Hyunwoo Kim published a working proof-of-concept for DirtyFrag - a Linux kernel local privilege escalation chain that gets unprivileged users to root on every major distribution. The embargo was broken by a third party before distribution backports were ready, so the exploit is public and the patch is not.CTO Jason Kikta and Landon Miles walk through what makes DirtyFrag different from the Copy Fail mitigation many teams already deployed (spoiler: the CopyFail mitigation does NOT cover this), why AWS is calling it a class rather than a single CVE, and the five kernel modules you need to block right now: esp4, esp6, ipcomp4, ipcomp6, and rxrpc.In this episode:Why the embargo break matters and what changed on May 7How DirtyFrag chains CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 to defeat both Ubuntu's namespace policy and the absence of rxrpc.ko on other distrosWhy this is the third generation of a bug class (DirtyPipe → Copy Fail → DirtyFrag) and what that means for what comes nextThe Automox Worklet that mitigates both arms across your Linux fleet, and what it deliberately does not doTested affected platforms: Ubuntu 24.04, RHEL 10.1, AlmaLinux 10, CentOS Stream 10, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora 44Back to the regular Patch Tuesday schedule next week.Links:Full blog post and mitigation guidance Automox Worklet (in-console for customers): Worklet source on GitHubHyunwoo Kim's PoC and write-upAWS Security Bulletin 2026-027CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail, parent issue)

April 28, 2026Episode 733 min

Autonomous IT, Live! The Math of Modern Attacks, E07

In this episode of Autonomous IT, Live!, we break down the widening gap between exploitation speed and remediation reality. Disclosed vulnerabilities keep climbing, exploitation windows keep shrinking, and IT and security teams are expected to absorb more risk without more resources. The traditional playbook — manual patching, fragmented workflows, scheduled cycles — was built for a slower world that no longer exists.What you'll learn:Why threat actors consistently outpace defender response timesWhere manual patching and fragmented processes break down, even for mature teamsHow rising vulnerability volume and shrinking exploitation timelines are reshaping riskWhy working harder isn't the answer — and what actually needs to changeWho should listen: IT and security leaders responsible for vulnerability management, infrastructure teams running distributed or SaaS-heavy environments, and anyone focused on shrinking exposure windows and accelerating response.The gap between attacker speed and defender capability isn't closing on its own. This conversation is about what it takes to close it.This live show originally aired April 22, 2026.

April 23, 2026Episode 237 min

Secure IT – Claude Mythos: AI Vulnerability Hype vs. Evidence, E23

Claude Mythos dominated the AI security conversation for two weeks straight, from the Cloud Security Alliance's strategy briefing to sharp public skepticism to yesterday's Bloomberg report that unauthorized users on Discord have been accessing Mythos since its limited launch. Host Jason Kikta cuts through the noise to separate the contested vendor claims from the established trend.In this episode:Why the Mythos debate misses the point, and the independently verified AI security milestones that predate it (XBOW topping HackerOne, DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge, Google Big Sleep, Claude Opus 4.6's 500+ high-severity findings)A careful look at the numbers behind Anthropic's system card, including the Firefox exploit rate dropping from 72.4% to 4.4% once pre-discovered bugs are removedThe CSA's top CISO recommendations that hold regardless of which Mythos claims you believe: patching, segmentation, egress filtering, MFA, defense in depthThree concrete actions to take this week, including the governance conversation most security leaders are overdue to have with the businessGood security starts with good IT. The trend is stable. The claims are contested. Anchor your planning accordingly.Links and sources:CSA briefingProject GlasswingMythos technical writeupOttenheimer system card teardownTom's Hardware on the 198 manual reviews: Bloomberg on the Discord leak