Same Scams, Cleaner Wrapper: Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the AI Era with Erich Kron

It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and Joe Carson is joined by Erich Kron of KnowBe4 to ask whether the classic messages — strong passwords, phishing awareness, MFA, and patching — still hold up. Spoiler: they do, but attackers have upgraded the wrapper. Erich explains why users should ignore deepfake "tells" and focus on emotion, urgency and the request itself, how phishing has moved into Teams, WhatsApp and SMS, and why agentic AI is exploding the number of non-human identities we already struggle to manage. They also cover email bombing, MFA fatigue, mitigation before patches, deepfakes in the courtroom, and the shift from ransomware encryption to data extortion.

Takeaways:

• I assert that classic measures — strong passwords, MFA, phishing awareness, and patching — remain essential against modern threats.
• We must focus on emotion, urgency, and the specific request rather than deepfake technical tells.
• I warn that phishing now spreads through Teams, WhatsApp, SMS, and other chat channels, bypassing email defenses.
• We see attackers using email bombing and MFA fatigue to overwhelm users and force mistaken approvals.
• I recommend rapid mitigation steps before vendor patches arrive, and maintain accurate inventory and segmentation of assets.
• We note that agentic AI and non human identities multiply attack surfaces and complicate identity and permission management.
• I emphasize that extortion of stolen data has eclipsed encryption based ransomware as the primary profit method for attackers.

Erich Kron — Security Awareness Advocate, KnowBe4

Erich Kron has worked in IT and security since the 1990s, when his first network ran Windows 3.1 and LANtastic. He has worked across healthcare and manufacturing, and spent around ten years with the US Department of Defense as security manager for the Second Regional Cyber Center, where he served as an Active Directory domain admin during the Army's AD deployment and supported network infrastructure across North America. He later served as a director at ISC2 before joining KnowBe4, where he has spent more than ten years helping organisations build security awareness and education programs that actually change behaviour. Erich is a frequent speaker at conferences, a regular at DEF CON and Black Hat, a hands-on experimenter with agentic AI, and an enthusiastic evangelist for Dungeon Crawler Carl.