Hosts:
Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/
Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/
Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/

One AI tool's price jumped from a fair quote to 10x more overnight. Is AI fear-mongering designed to keep you locked in?

Every week there's a new AI headline promising the end of the world. Models "escaping" sandboxes, CEOs quitting to warn everyone AI is too dangerous, calls to slow down before it's too late. Justin Shelley, Mario Zaki, and Josh Holloway put their tinfoil hats on for episode 104 and ask the question nobody in the AI industry wants to answer: who actually benefits from all of this fear?

The conversation gets real fast. Justin shares a tool he's been using where the base price stayed reasonable, but the AI component quietly went from a quoted price to 1,000% more once it left beta. Josh breaks down how AI-driven demand has tripled server prices in under a year and stretched lead times from days to months, and shares a story about a client who was sold an 8-year-old server as brand new. Mario explains why bringing AI models in-house still doesn't pencil out financially for most small businesses, even though the appetite to escape subscription pricing is growing fast.

The theory they land on: the same companies telling you AI is too powerful to control might also be the ones most threatened by you running it yourself. If self-hosted, open-source AI models let businesses skip the subscription treadmill, then scaring the public into demanding regulation is a convenient way to make sure that option quietly disappears. Whether you buy the conspiracy or not, this episode will change how you read the next AI doom headline.

What you'll learn:

• Why the "we need to slow down AI development" argument falls apart the moment you follow the money
• How one AI vendor's price jumped from a reasonable quote to 1,000% more once it left beta
• The real story of a client sold an 8-year-old server as "brand new," and how to make sure your IT provider never does that to you
• Why AI-capable server prices have tripled in under a year, with lead times stretching from days to months
• The theory that scary AI headlines are less about safety and more about keeping businesses locked into subscriptions instead of running AI in-house

New episodes drop every week with real, unfiltered conversations about the technology and security decisions actually affecting small business owners. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Worried about where your data lives, who controls it, and what happens if a vendor you rely on gets breached or jacks up their prices? That's exactly the kind of risk Phoenix IT Advisors helps small businesses get in front of. Visit PhoenixITAdvisors.com to schedule a consult and find out where your business actually stands.

Links:
Full episode: https://unhackmybusiness.com/episode/104
Phoenix IT Advisors: https://phoenixitadvisors.com
More UnHacked: @UnHackedPodcast

A researcher just quit Anthropic warning AI could end humanity within four years. Microsoft shipped a record 974 security patches that same month.

On this episode of UnHacked, Justin Shelley, Bryan Lachapelle, Mario Zaki, and Joshua Holloway dig into the headlines everyone's arguing about right now: a former AI researcher's public warning that AI has more than a 10 percent chance of killing all humans by the end of the decade, and Sam Altman's own estimate putting that number closer to 25 percent. They break down what it would actually take for AI to end humanity (infrastructure attacks, water treatment systems, job displacement) and why the scarier headline might be the one nobody's talking about: Microsoft just blew past its previous patch record by nearly double, and no business on earth can manually test and deploy 974 patches from one vendor alone.

The conversation also goes inside Josh's actual AI coding workflow, a "council of five" system where multiple AI agents review each other's work, including a dedicated security audit council, before anything ships. Mario makes the case that AI replacing hard-to-fill jobs isn't the villain story everyone assumes, especially after years of ghosted interviews and no-show hires since COVID. And Justin makes the argument that this whole panic cycle looks a lot like Y2K, the nuclear arms race, and 1980s acid rain scares: real fears, mostly survived.

What you'll learn:

• Why Microsoft's record 974 patches (almost double its previous record) make manual patch testing impossible, and where AI-driven patching is headed next
• How Josh's multi-agent "council of five" AI coding process works, including a separate security council that audits everything before deployment
• The real numbers behind the AI doom headlines (10 to 25 percent estimated risk) and what it would actually take for AI to cause that kind of damage
• Why hiring struggles since COVID have Mario openly in favor of AI taking over jobs nobody's showing up for anymore
• Why the hosts believe this fear cycle mirrors Y2K, the nuclear arms race, and the acid rain panic, and what that history means for business owners right now

Every week the UnHacked crew breaks down what's actually happening in AI, cybersecurity, and business technology, without the headline panic. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Keeping up with hundreds of security patches a month isn't something most businesses can do alone, and guessing your way through it is how breaches happen. Phoenix IT Advisors helps small and mid-sized businesses build a real patching and cybersecurity strategy instead of hitting "apply" and hoping. Visit PhoenixITAdvisors.com to schedule a consult.

Links:

• Episode: https://unhackmybusiness.com/episode/103
• Phoenix IT Advisors: https://phoenixitadvisors.com
• More UnHacked: @UnHackedPodcast

Hosts:
Justin Shelley - https://www.phoenixitadvisors.com/
Mario Zaki - https://www.mazteck.com/
Joshua Holloway - https://7thdi.com/

AI didn't go rogue and hack a company on its own. Someone pointed a jailbroken AI at an unpatched server, and it finished a full ransomware attack in about 30 minutes.

Security researchers at Sysdig just documented the first fully autonomous, AI-driven ransomware attack, nicknamed "Jade Puffer." No human touched a keyboard once it started. It broke in, mapped the network, rewrote its own code to dodge detection, and deployed ransomware, start to finish, faster than most security teams could even get an alert out. Experts are now saying the response window for an attack like this has shrunk from hours to as little as 15 minutes.

Justin Shelley, Mario Zaki, and Joshua Holloway break down what actually happened, and why the scary headline ("AI attacks company, no humans involved") is only half the story. The real vulnerability wasn't AI. It was a production MySQL server exposed to the internet, running unpatched software with a known critical flaw, and a default signing key that hadn't been changed since 2020. The AI didn't discover some brand-new weakness. It exploited the same lazy, preventable gaps that have caused breaches for a decade, just a lot faster.

Josh also shares a live horror story about an MSP that disabled a client's VPN and locked them out of their own data over a single unpaid invoice, in the middle of an unrelated legal dispute, then demanded tens of thousands of dollars before restoring access. It's a hard look at what happens when a business has no idea what their IT provider is actually doing for them, and no leverage when things go sideways.

What you'll learn:

• How the first fully autonomous AI ransomware attack worked, from breach to payload in under 30 minutes
• Why the vulnerability that let it happen was public knowledge for over a year, and completely preventable with basic patching
• Why publishing CVEs (known vulnerabilities) helps defenders more than it helps attackers
• Why the AI-generated ransomware couldn't have paid off even if the victim tried, because the encryption key was never stored anywhere
• Red flags that your MSP isn't doing what you're paying them for, and what to do if one tries to hold your data hostage

New episodes of UnHacked drop every week with real talk on cybersecurity, AI, and the tech risks actually hitting small business owners. Subscribe so the next one doesn't catch you off guard.

Not sure if your IT company is actually protecting you or just collecting a check? Phoenix IT Advisors helps small and mid-sized businesses find out, patch what's exposed, and build security that doesn't rely on luck. Visit PhoenixITAdvisors.com to schedule a consult.

Links:
Full episode: https://unhackmybusiness.com/episode/102
Phoenix IT Advisors: https://phoenixitadvisors.com
More UnHacked: @UnHackedPodcast