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Caleb Tolan
You're listening to the Cyberwire Network powered by N2K.
Dave Bittner
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That's Talas T H A L E S learn more@talisgroup.com cyber the FCC plans to roll back cybersecurity mandates that followed Salt Typhoon. The alleged cyber criminal Mr. ICQ has been extradited to the US ransomware negotiat are accused of conducting ransomware attacks. Ernst and Young accidentally exposed a 4 terabyte SQL server backup. A hacker claims responsibilities for last week's University of Pennsylvania breach. The UK chronicles cyber attacks on Britain's drinking water suppliers. We've got our Monday Business Brief. Our guest is Caleb Tolan, host of Rubrik's Data Security Decoded podcast and Hackers Massage the Truth. It's Monday, November 3rd, 2025. I'm Dave Bittner and this is your Cyberwire Intel Briefing. Hello and thanks for joining us here today. It's great as always to have you with us. The Federal Communications Commission plans to rescind several cybersecurity mandates introduced after the Salt Typhoon hacking campaign in which Chinese state backed actors breached major US Telecoms to steal communications involving Donald Trump, JD Vance and other officials. The rules issued in January, required carriers to implement formal risk management plans and certain compliance annually. FCC Secretary Marlene Dorch called the measures legally erroneous and overly broad, arguing they imposed inflexible, redundant requirements regardless of company size or risk profile. Instead, the FCC said it will emphasize voluntary, collaborative cybersecurity efforts through public private partnerships. Telecom companies told the agency they have already strengthened defenses, citing faster patching, tighter access controls and expanded threat sharing with US Agencies. Critics, including Senator Mark Warner, warned that weak oversight contributed to what he called the worst telecom hack in our nation's history. The FCC will vote on the rollback November 20th. Ukrainian national Yuri Riptsoff, known online as Mr. ICQ, has been extradited to the US after his arrest in Italy for his role in the Jaber Zeus cybercrime group, Krebson security reports. Indicted in 2012, Ribsov allegedly helped develop and operate a modified version of the Zeus banking trojan that stole tens of millions of dollars from US Businesses through Man in the browser attacks. The malware intercepted online banking data, enabling the group to redirect payroll funds through networks of money mules. Investigators say Ripsoft helped manage victim notifications and launder stolen funds. His former associate, Vaikoslav Penkukov, was sentenced in 2023 to 18 years in prison. The Jabr Zeus operation is also linked to Maksim Yakubets, leader of Evil Corp, a Russian based gang responsible for over $100 million in global financial theft. Two US cybersecurity professionals have been indicted for allegedly conducting ransomware attacks while employed to negotiate with cybercriminals. Prosecutors say Kevin Tyler Martin, a former ransomware negotiator at Digital Mint, and Ryan Clifford Goldberg, an incident response manager at Signia, conspired with another Digital Mint employee to extort millions from multiple organizations between May 2023 and April 2025. The group reportedly infected a Florida medical firm demanding $10 million and ultimately stealing $1.2 million in cryptocurrency, which they laundered through mixers and digital wallets. They also targeted companies in Maryland, California and Virginia. Both men have been charged with conspiracy, extortion and damaging protected computers. Digital Mint fired the suspects and cooperated with the FBI, stressing that no client systems were compromised. Goldberg is in custody. Martin was released on bond. Ernst and Young accidentally exposed a 4 terabyte SQL server backup on Microsoft Azure discovered in October 2025 by Dutch firm Neo Security during Attack Surface scans. The leak, traced to a misconfigured cloud storage instance from an EY Italy acquisition, left the massive file publicly accessible. EY said no client or confidential data was compromised and attributed the issue to an isolated system outside its global network. The exposure's contents and duration remain unclear, though the file was confirmed unencrypted. A hacker has claimed responsibility for the University of Pennsylvania breach that led to offensive we got hacked emails sent to alumni and students last week. The attacker says the intrusion exposed data on 1.2 million donors, students and alumni, including personal and demographic details, donation history and estimated net worth. Using a compromised employee's Pen Key SSO credentials, the hacker allegedly accessed Penn's Salesforce, SAP, Qlik, SharePoint and VPN systems before being locked out. They then used Salesforce marketing cloud to send masked emails to about 700,000 recipients. The hacker denies political motives, saying their goal was Penn's donor database, which they may release later. Penn confirmed it is investigating while experts urge donors to watch for phishing and fraudulent solicitations. Hackers have launched five cyber attacks on Britain's drinking water suppliers since 2024, the highest number in any two year span, according to data from the Drinking Water Inspectorate. While none disrupted water safety, the incidents targeted the organizations behind critical infrastructure, underscoring growing cyber risks. The attacks were voluntarily reported despite not meeting the threshold under the NIS regulations, which only mandate disclosure if essential services are disrupted. Officials plan to lower that bar through the upcoming Cybersecurity and Resilience bill. Experts praised the voluntary transparency, citing the importance of sharing intelligence about ransomware and industrial control system threats. Britain's National Cybersecurity center urges utilities to strengthen segmentation between IT and operational systems to reduce future attack impact. Turning to our Monday business brief, the cybersecurity sector saw a wave of acquisitions and funding rounds last week. Jumpcloud acquired identity threat detection firm Breeze to expand its ITDR capabilities, while Presidio agreed to buy Irish MSP ergo, strengthening its UK and Ireland presence. MTX Group acquired Verify ID AI, boosting its AI based identity verification offerings DeWitt purchased Israel's Cloudwise to integrate compliance and security with cloud management, and Advent Partners took a majority stake in Australian MSP fx. Meanwhile, Insight Enterprises plans to acquire Sydney based Sukuro to grow its APAC cybersecurity footprint. On the funding front, Chainguard raised $280 million to accelerate software supply chain security adoption, and Sublime Security secured $150 million for AI driven email defense. Other raises include Conductor 1 with $79 million, SimSpace 39 million, Nexus AI 30 million, Cyber Ridge 26 million, Darwin AI 15 million, Akuru 10 million and Polygraph at $9.5 million. Be sure to check out our complete weekly business brief part of Cyberwire Pro on our website. Coming up after the break, my conversation. Caleb Tolan, host of Rubrik's Data Security Decoded Podcast, will have a preview of his show debuting right here on the N2K CyberWire network and Hackers Massage the truth. Stay with us.
Trevor Hilligoss
What happens when cybercrime becomes as easy as shopping online? Spy Cloud's Trevor Hilligoss joined Dave Bittner on the Cyberwire Daily to explain how a wave of cybercrime enablement services are lowering the barrier to entry and making sophisticated attacks available to anyone. I think it's a pretty good general term that describes kind of an umbrella of tools and services that I would kind of tag as criminal or criminal adjacent. Instead of having sort of the smaller pool of high sophistication actors that are able to kind of carry out these really vast and costly cyber attacks, we see that being given to much lower sophistication, lower tech folks that are a much lower barrier to entry. To get into this field, the person that's buying access to this, they basically need a phone and a bitcoin wallet. Make sure you hear this full conversation and learn how the underground economy is reshaping Cyber risk. Visit explore.thecyberwire.com spycloud that's explore.thecyberwire.Com spycloud.
Dave Bittner
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Caleb Tolan
Thank you for having me. I'm incredibly excited to chat with you. More about it we have some really interesting conversations on the podcast and I think this will be a productive conversation.
Dave Bittner
Well, we're excited to have the show. Join us here on the N2K CyberWire network. Tell us about the origin story of this podcast. What did you set out to do?
Caleb Tolan
Yeah, so we started the podcast when Rubrik, the company sponsoring the podcast, launched our research division. Rubrik Zero Labs and Rubrik zero Labs started with the mission to provide vendor agnostic actionable insights to reduce data security risk and improve cyber resilience outcomes. And while we've kind of expanded our credo a little bit, outside of just focusing on the Rubrik zero labs research, we do include all of that and like to feature the interesting insights that that organization creates. We also have brought in so many interesting guests across threat intelligence, cyber policy, the defender world as well, kind of on the enterprise side. And we ultimately are still striving towards improving cyber resilience outcomes for our listeners and providing those actionable, actionable insights for our listeners.
Dave Bittner
Well, help me understand the mix that you are looking to achieve here. I mean, how much of it is technical? How much of it is conversations about folks, experiences?
Caleb Tolan
Yeah, it's a nice mix of all of it because we want to provide kind of that cutting edge in real time research from the cyber researchers and the community out there of threat intelligence analysts who are finding new vulnerabilities, new tactics from threat actors. But we also want to have the conversation with cyber policy writers and the folks who are actually crafting policy. Not here, just in the US but also globally as well. Because so many of our listeners come from Europe or Asia where honestly, if you're operating a multinational company, there's so many challenges you have from a regulatory standpoint. It's important to have those policy conversations as well and have that perspective mixed in so that our listeners are fully informed. And from there too, we also want to speak with the defenders themselves and hear their stories from the front lines. We want to have the conversations with the folks who are in the socks, who are doing the fingers on keyboards work. And we also want to have those strategic conversations with the CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, Chief Data Officers, all of these folks who are at the more board level. Because there's also this conversation to be had about communicating as a technical leader to non technical leaders and speaking the language of business and speaking the language of risk. So we kind of are balancing all of these conversations within the podcast, which is sometimes a little tricky because, you know, we're publishing an episode usually twice a month, so there's a lot of content that we have to get out there and I know folks are hungry for, but that's kind of the mix that we're looking to get.
Dave Bittner
Well, can you give us a preview of some of the episodes you have coming up and some of the folks you're going to be talking to?
Caleb Tolan
Yes, absolutely. Actually, we have an episode going out tomorrow with Lauren Zabrick who was formerly at cisa. Now she runs another organization that is kind of continuing some of her mission and her work that she was performing at CISA and through the Share the Mic in Cyber program as well, which is a kind of subsidiary of New America, helping elevate different underrepresented communities in the cybersphere and talking about policy and technology and how these worlds inter. Inter collide, if you will. And so that one's going live tomorrow and they are doing some really interesting work at her organization. So I highly recommend folks give that a listen. We're going to be talking about secure by design, secure by demand, and really it's a conversation about securing the software supply chain for organizations and for. For ultimately end customers. And then we also have some interesting insights from some cyber researchers coming. I don't want to tease too much of it because I don't want to give away the full story, but some interesting insights about how different counties and local governments are uniquely impacted by this geopolitical landscape because they're oftentimes the targets from very sophisticated cybercrime groups and threat actors. State sponsored oftentimes. But these organizations are critically underfunded and under resources and understaffed. So how these organizations operating critical infrastructure because counties and local governments oftentimes are the ones running our water supply systems, our electrical grids, all sorts of critical services, how they can secure these critical systems while being underfunded and under resourced. So those are two episodes we have coming up soon. I am very eager to get those out and hope folks enjoy the insights that we glean from those.
Dave Bittner
It sounds interesting. I've had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren Zabrick several times over the years and every conversation I've had with her is time well spent.
Caleb Tolan
Yes. Yeah, Lauren's great. Shout out to Lauren. I'm sure you're listening. And many folks in the cyberwire world I know are familiar with her and the great work that she's done.
Dave Bittner
Well, Caleb, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you get started in all this and what led you to where you are today?
Caleb Tolan
Yeah, so funny enough going back to when I was in college, actually, I did not at all pursue a education in the technical sphere. I spent most of my time studying musical theater actually. And I would say that was about three years of my time in school. And you know, I'm a lifelong theater nerd, if you will. Love seeing shows when I can and participating to some extent and definitely having a lot of jams out in the car to different musicals and soundtracks. You know, I kind of made a transition to focus more on communications and actually political science. So when I graduated. I was looking to go into the D.C. area and kind of help, you know, make an impact from a policy perspective and a political standpoint. And ultimately I. That was not for me. I mean, I thought I was going to go up. I don't know if you've seen the TV show Scandal, but I was planning to go up to D.C. and be the next Olivia Pope. And that did not work out for me. And I didn't. That wasn't the right path for me. So I ended up actually kind of stumbling my way into working in this enterprise tech world. And I, most recently, prior to my current role, was over at Nutanix. And that was my big introduction to the world of enterprise technology, cloud computing, and, you know, my first exposure to this world. And I've been at Rubrik for a little over four and a half years now. And it's been really exciting to see the more niche area of cyber security because it's obviously such a dynamic, dynamic field to be in because we're sitting here, we're talking about technology, but we're also talking about policy. We're talking about even the psychology of what it's like to be a defender and the toll that it takes on you as oftentimes a very mission driven person. And so going back to that original background, starting in theater, something that we learned a lot about in school was focusing on listening and reacting and being very present in real time and telling a really impactful story. And so that is why I think that this opportunity to do this podcast and share the stories of so many people who are doing really critical work for our critical infrastructure, for our national security, for our global political ecosystem is a really interesting and intriguing feat.
Dave Bittner
Well, I'm a theater kid myself, and I have to say all those lessons I learned along the way have served me well in my own job here, interviewing and reporting and doing all the things I do here. So it sounds like you are well equipped and on your way.
Caleb Tolan
Yeah, yeah. Well, what's your favorite show? Do you have a favorite one?
Dave Bittner
I think it's hard for. In terms of musicals, it's hard to beat the music Man.
Caleb Tolan
Very nice. Very nice. I was actually, I remember in high school it was going to be a production that we were going to do and then ultimately it fell through the cracks and we weren't able to. Able to pull it off. So that was a little unfortunate. But it is a great show and a classic for sure. One of my favorites is Big Fish, which is a musical based off of the movie. If anybody's seen it. I mean, it's incredible. I actually haven't even seen it in person. I've just seen, you know, bootleg clips and listen to the music. But it's just an incredible way to tell a very mystical and magical story and navigating a interesting and dynamic relationship between father and son. I think it's just a beautiful story and it's a beautifully done show. I also got to see I mentioned this in one of our recent episodes because I like to talk about things that people are obsessed with outside of cyber. But I was recently in New York and got to see oh Mary with Jinx Monsoon, who was playing Mary Todd Lincoln at the time. And that was a play, not a musical, but it was just exceedingly hilarious. And you know, it's a very, very good show. So love it. Love meeting a fellow theater nerd.
Dave Bittner
Yeah, well, there's nothing like live theater. And Caleb Tolan is host of Rubrik's Data Security Decoded podcast. They are joining us here on the N2K CyberWire network. You can find that wherever you get your favorite podcast. Please do check it out. Caleb, thanks so much for joining us.
Caleb Tolan
Thank you, Dave.
Dave Bittner
That's Caleb Tolan, host of the Data Security Decoded podcast from Rubrik. Be sure to check it out wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And finally, South Korean police have busted a fishing gang with a particularly creative business model, blackmailing people over massage videos that never existed. According to the local provincial police agency, a hacker in his 30s and three 20something accomplices stole client data from a massage parlor owner's phones, then used it to threaten 62 victims with imaginary footage of their visits, their script pay up or your massage session goes viral. Police trace the group to a local office packed with burner phones, laptops, and what must have been a very awkward to do list. The hacker, already in custody for another cybercrime, was joined by 10 helpful accomplices who managed everything from hiding fugitives to laundering the loot. Authorities say the gang's operation has been permanently shut down, no patch or update required. And that's the Cyber Wire. For links to all of today's stories, check out our daily briefing@thecyberwire.com don't forget to check out the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast, where I contribute to a regular segment on Jason and Brian's show every week. You can find Grumpy Old Geeks where all the fine podcasts are listed. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to cyberwire2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our Cyberwire producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Peter Kilby is our publisher, and I'm Dave Bittner. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Sam.
Episode: "FCC resets cyber oversight"
Date: November 3, 2025
Host: Dave Bittner (N2K Networks)
This episode examines the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) move to roll back recent cybersecurity mandates prompted by nation-state attacks, provides an industry news round-up—including cybercrime cases, disclosures, and regulatory shifts—and features an in-depth interview with Caleb Tolan, host of the new “Data Security Decoded” podcast, exploring the intersection of cyber research, policy, and defense perspectives.
Extradition of ‘Mr. ICQ’ (Yuri Riptsoff) (03:05):
Cyber Negotiators Become Criminals (04:10):
Ernst & Young Cloud Exposure (05:22):
University of Pennsylvania Data Breach (06:02):
UK Water Utilities Under Attack (07:08):
Guest: Caleb Tolan, Host of Rubrik's Data Security Decoded
Host: Dave Bittner
“We want to provide kind of that cutting edge in real time research from the cyber researchers... but we also want to have the conversation with cyber policy writers and the folks who are actually crafting policy... it’s important to have those policy conversations as well and have that perspective mixed in so that our listeners are fully informed.”
— Caleb Tolan (15:25)
“There’s also this conversation to be had about communicating as a technical leader to non technical leaders and speaking the language of business and speaking the language of risk.”
— Caleb Tolan (15:47)
“...counties and local governments oftentimes are the ones running our water supply systems, our electrical grids, all sorts of critical services, how they can secure these critical systems while being underfunded and under resourced.”
— Caleb Tolan (17:54)
“Going back to that original background, starting in theater... focusing on listening and reacting and being very present in real time and telling a really impactful story... sharing the stories of so many people who are doing really critical work for our critical infrastructure, for our national security, for our global political ecosystem is a really interesting and intriguing feat.”
— Caleb Tolan (20:54)
This episode offers a broad sweep of recent policy shifts, criminal cases, and security lapses in the global cyber landscape. The highlight is a lively and insightful preview of “Data Security Decoded,” aimed at bridging research, policy, and the lived experience of defenders, capturing the human stories behind cybersecurity’s technical headlines.
Listeners not only get industry updates but also a sense of the evolving conversations happening at the intersection of technology, governance, and narrative storytelling.