You arrive at work tomorrow and are greeted by the news that a cyber-attack has compromised your district’s network, and the network is unavailable. What is the first thing you do? What is the second? When confronted by such alarming news, most people would be overwhelmed and unsure of the next steps.

I read the other day that today is “Worldwide Backup Awareness Day.” I have no idea who declares these days. I am guessing you already know you should have good backups and air-gapped backups. However, I am taking the liberty of morphing this into more sophisticated forms of backups.

Here is my “Top 5” list to up your cybersecurity defenses: Make sure that whatever your current endpoint protection strategy is, it is 100% in place. There are always better tools. However, repeatedly, the attackers are exploiting gaps in your cyber defenses.

There is a new, growing attack surface that is becoming increasingly dangerous to your network operations—the cloud, specifically your Google Apps or Microsoft 365 cloud instances. I have read commentary that M365 is believed to have the greater attack surface.

Welcome back! This summer flew by, and my summer vacation seems like a distant memory. In my 44 years of helping schools open for the new school year, this one was different. Several districts suspended all major work the last week of August. This was a summer of busy projects.

A year ago, my very short wife sat in a restaurant during March Madness on a bar stool that was too tall for her. The result was that while getting down off the stool, she blew out a disk in her back and was in tremendous pain. We went to a local ortho walk-in clinic.

You already know that “all” in security protection is vitally important. You need all your endpoints and servers protected with something. Hopefully, that something is EDR, MDR, and XDR products like CSI’s CSEDR powered by SentinelOne, CSMDR powered by Blackpoint plus SentinelOne, or CSI’s Managed XDR service powered by BlueShift Cybersecurity.

We live in interesting times and continue to face unique challenges to keep your school district safe and stable so teachers can teach, students can learn, and the staff behind the scenes can do all the important tasks that make the district function well.

You have probably heard of the AT&T breach by now. Reports describe it as the largest breach in history with serious national security consequences. AT&T has reported that threat actors stole all client call and text records for six months. I have not read anything indicating that the threat actors know the contents of any […]

“Trust but verify.” -President Ronald Reagan, December 8th, 1987, at the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty Signing I watched a presentation the other day by the head of Threat Operations for a major Security Operations Center (SOC) that provides 24/7 security oversight over networks like yours.