Autonomous IT

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...

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 whe...

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:

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 c...

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, an...