FIT for Success Podcast

#14 - The Supply Chain Attack That Shut Down 14 Toyota Plants in One Day | Guest: Sumit Vakil

A ransomware attack on a single supplier. Fourteen Toyota plants shut down. 13,000 cars not built. In one day.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Sumit Vakil — co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Resilinc, one of the world's leading experts in supply chain risk — to talk about the cybersecurity threat most businesses overlook entirely: their suppliers. Sumit breaks down how a breach anywhere in your supply chain can shut down your operations, cost you key contracts, and damage your brand for years — not weeks.
He also explains why the operational technology running most factory floors is the thing that actually keeps him up at night, and why an air gap between IT and OT systems is rarely as real as companies think.

#13 - A Green Beret's Guide to Defending Your Business From Cyber Attack | Guest: Sean Brehm

Sean Brehm has fought in three domains of warfare. He thinks cybersecurity is the fifth — and most businesses are sending their cook into a knife fight.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Sean Brehm — Special Forces veteran, former IBM AI executive, and founder of CrowdPoint Technologies — to explore why the military framework for defending a city maps almost perfectly onto defending a business network. Sean breaks down his eight fundamentals of cybersecurity, explains why most companies don't even know what they own, and shares his "Cancun analogy" — a story he's told on stage that makes the case for why AI built by PhDs and accountants isn't the same as AI built by warriors.
They also talk about a 25-person company that lost $5 million to a criminal who had been silently reading their emails for months.

#12 - What the NSA Taught Me About Ransomware Prevention | Guest: Robert Thomas

Most businesses think cybersecurity insurance will save them. Robert Thomas thinks they're reading the fine print wrong.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Robert Thomas — former NSA intelligence officer and founder of 180A Consulting — to break down how the cybersecurity insurance landscape has quietly changed, and why the policy you bought might not cover anywhere near what you think it does. He shares a real example of a restaurant chain that was offered $2 million in coverage for a risk category where the average payout was $145 million.
Robert also walks through his "big five" ransomware prevention framework, including why the DNS security most businesses rely on is updated on a 24-hour cycle when the best tools update every 20 minutes — and why that gap matters more than most IT teams realize.

#11 - SIM Cloning, Real-Time Phishing, and Why Your Cyber Stack Needs to Change Every Year | Guest: Matthew Connor

Most businesses assume cybersecurity is a one-time fix. Matthew Connor has spent 11 years proving it isn't.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Matthew Connor — Army Intel veteran, Mandarin speaker, and founder of CyberLynx — to talk about how fast the threat landscape is moving and what businesses need to do to keep up. Matthew breaks down SIM cloning attacks that defeated multi-factor authentication at a private equity firm, explains how modern phishing pages now authenticate criminals into your accounts in real time as you're being fooled, and walks through why global admin privileges on a business owner's primary email is one of the most common and costly mistakes he sees.
He and Ephraim also get into the conversation every IT person dreads — convincing decision-makers to act before the breach happens — and what actually works.

#10 - The Law That Could Change How Every Business Handles Cybersecurity | Guest: Karen Worstell

Most organizations treat cybersecurity as a technical problem. Karen Worstell thinks it's a business imperative — and the law is starting to agree.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Karen Worstell, a cybersecurity pioneer who got her start at Boeing in the late '80s before going on to run security at Bank of America, AT&T Wireless, Microsoft, and VMware. Karen introduces the concept of duty of care in cybersecurity — a legal and financial framework that's already been adopted by 10 states — and explains why the word "reasonable" in security policy has been the industry's biggest loophole for decades.
She also makes the case that the number one cybersecurity threat most organizations aren't talking about isn't ransomware. It's technical debt.

#9 - What 20 Years in Law Firm IT Actually Teaches You About Security | Guest: Ray Moore

Twenty years ago, cybersecurity wasn't even on the radar for law firm IT directors. The job was keeping systems up. Today, it might be the most consequential role in the building.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Ray Moore — a veteran IT leader who spent decades inside law firms before bringing that experience to FIT Solutions — to talk about how the threat landscape has transformed, and what most firms are still getting wrong. Ray shares the moment a major multinational firm's ransomware spread site-to-site because they'd built a system where every office could access every other office's data, and how that single incident sparked a zero trust conversation across the entire industry.
They also get into the dark web market for pre-compromised network access — where criminals sell footholds inside organizations they haven't gotten around to exploiting yet.

#8 - How a 500-Person Law Firm Thinks About Cybersecurity | Guest: James Harden

Law firms are one of the most targeted organizations in cybersecurity, and one of the hardest to protect. Attorneys want zero friction, zero downtime, and zero interruptions to billing. Convincing them to care about security is a battle all its own.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with Jim Harden, Director of IT at Tyson & Mendes, a fully remote law firm that has grown to over 500 staff with 20% year-over-year growth. Jim breaks down how his team built a multi-layered security posture from the ground up, why criminals specifically target law firm LinkedIn profiles to craft attacks, and how a class action settlement wire transfer was nearly hijacked by attackers who had been silently reading email threads for months.
He also gets into monthly phishing simulations, the problem of notification fatigue, and why 24/7 SOC coverage is worth every penny.

#7 - The Points That Almost Broke Us, and the Systems That Didn't | Guests: Damien + David

Every growing business hits a wall. The question is whether you have the systems to break through it.
In part two of FIT Solutions' origin story, Ephraim, David, and Damien get into the harder lessons, the clients they lost and won back, the leadership gaps that cost them, and the specific breakpoints (at $3M, $5M, $8M, $15M, and $25M) where the business almost came apart at the seams.
They also talk about what actually changed everything: core values presentations that filter out the wrong hires before they start, role play training that compresses years of experience into weeks, and a daily all-hands format that finally connected a team spread across the country.
If you've ever wondered what scaling a company actually feels like from the inside, this is it.

#6 - From a Gym Office to $30M: The Early Days of FIT Solutions | Guests: Damien Anderson + David Gadson

What does it actually look like to build a company from nothing?
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim sits down with two of FIT Solutions' longest-tenured team members — David Gadson (employee #4) and Damien Anderson (employee #6), to pull back the curtain on the early days of building the company. They talk about the gym that doubled as their first office, the bar where they conducted job interviews, and the moment Ephraim turned down a $130,000 job offer to bet on himself.
You'll hear about the sleepless nights, the payrolls that almost didn't clear, and the scrappy decisions that kept the company alive long enough to become what it is today, from hand-building servers and overnighting them to clients in Idaho, to watching Ephraim draw org charts for teams that didn't exist yet.
If you're building something from scratch, this one will feel uncomfortably familiar.

#5 - Cyber Threats Nobody's Talking About | Guest: Damien Anderson

Most businesses assume they're too small to be a target. They're not.
In this episode of FIT for Success, Ephraim Ebstein and Damien Anderson — vCISO of FIT Solutions — pull back the curtain on what's actually happening in the cybersecurity world right now, including the threats that never make the news.
They share real breach stories from the field: a crane rental company that lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fake invoices, healthcare facilities left unable to access patient records mid-shift, and a criminal who bypassed multi-factor authentication using a stolen Apple ID — and was only caught because someone noticed two simultaneous logins from opposite sides of the country.
You'll also hear why nearly 50% of organizations experienced a data breach in a recent two-year period, why the FBI won't help you if the attack costs less than a million dollars, and the three steps every business should take right now to close the most common gaps.