Resources

K-12 education has been turned upside down. Remote learning is obviously the term du jour. At the same time as we are figuring out what remote instruction means, school districts still have to keep the buildings safe and run all the back-office functions.

This morning I read the headline that a second New York school district has shutdown over Coronavirus concerns.  The question becomes how does a school district function if school is closed for an extended period of time?   Besides the obvious impacts to teaching and learning there is a whole lot of back office processes that […]

The Cybersecurity news has been pretty depressing over the last week. I read an article that a Cybersecurity insurance company is refusing to pay for a Merck breach incident because it is NotPetya and that is from Russia and was designed as a cyber warfare tool.

This week’s Tech Tidbit is shorter on my thoughts and words since the attached link below contains lots of reading on its own. For the start of the new school year the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of the US Dept of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Awareness System put out a nice document […]

Over the past few weeks, we have had a number of cases where support tickets needed to be opened to resolve issues where end-users were reporting “inability to access the Internet.”  These can be frustrating and stressful for both end-users and the responding techs.

We harp on the fact that if you have *ANY* VPN, or remote access capabilities into your district, you *MUST* use a commercial SSL certificate and not a self-signed SSL – no exceptions. However, an area of growing frustration is that many current browsers are starting to give warnings about whether or not you should […]

Now that we have shifted to predominantly remote workers and remote teaching and learning, we have a number of new challenges as well as increased threats. Challenge #1 – Remote File Access.   The solution is moving files from traditional home directories and traditional common drives to cloud-based shared folders and home directories.

This tidbit is a refresher on looking at Cisco Firepower Intrusion Event logs and daily reports. Specifically, I wanted to review for all of you again the meaning of two key columns, the Impact and Inline Result columns The Firepower Impact scale is designed to help the recipient understand where to focus scarce resources first.

This week’s Tech Tidbit is short and sweet. If you have a server or device that is internet facing, make sure you have a real, commercial SSL certificate on it.   Do not use a self-signed certificate.   I don’t really care that it is just for “internal” use and you are smart enough to bypass the […]

One of the key features of the newest firewalls and intrusion protection systems (IPS) has been the addition of something called GeoBlocking. This feature allows the administrator to shut down traffic to or from specific countries or regions of the world and your local network regardless of any other firewall permissions in place.