The Wyant Cybersecurity Brief with Tom Wyant

A few episodes back, we talked about Security Incident Event Managers (SIEMs) and how they watch for things like employees logging into Microsoft 360 through the wrong network or the sudden deletion of a lot of files from OneDrive. Security Operations Centers, or SOCs, work hand-in-hand with SIEMs to enhance your cybersecurity. Basically, the SIEM creates the log of potentially suspicious activity...

Almost all e-mail providers come with some sort of spam filtering, and while it’s usually halfway decent at telling the difference, yes it can be annoying when it send legitimate e-mail to spam. But have you considered that you might WANT your legitimate e-mail to go to spam? Microsoft 365 is a very reliable platform that rarely goes down, but like any cloud-based or remote service, there ar...

Whether you’re an established expert at cybersecurity, an up-and-coming dynamo, or a layperson who’s here educating yourself, you have probably at least heard the word “encryption”. We use several types of encryption. One goes on laptop hard drives so if the employee or user gets separated from their laptop (lost or stolen or whatever), nobody can just pop out the hard driv...

Security Incident Event Managers (SIEMs) are not the seams in your pants or the seams in your shirts – but they will protect the seams in your proverbial pants from getting ripped open by hackers, malware, and bad actors. In many cases, potential threats to your users’ security look innocuous enough, such as the case when an employee who uses a VPN forgot to shut it off before accessin...

Here at the Wyant Cybersecurity Brief, our mission is to take cybersecurity – which many people dread as an expense, a chore, or just an annoyance – and makes it easy and fun (yes, fun) for everyone. You can do this through how you design your Security Awareness Training. Basically, this involves teaching our users how to recognize and avoid phishing scams, occasionally testing them to see if they...

Secure Access Service Edge, known as SASE, is pronounced “sassy” but it doesn’t have to do with smart-mouth teenagers. It DOES have to do with protecting you from the “brats”, also known as hackers and other bad actors, who are trying to get into your network through your employees’ laptops and devices. In this episode, Managed Service Provider Tom Wyant lays ou...

Shadow IT refers to a process where you install an agent that studies your users’ computers to determine what applications they’re running both locally and over the web. Chances are, you know they’re using Office 365, Adobe, whatever proprietary database software you use for record-keeping, and everything else you decided should be part of their software suite. But are they using...

IT Policies tell your employees what is expected of them when it comes to your network, your equipment, and what is expected and acceptable procedure and behavior. We think of policies like: whether you can bring your own device to work, where you can access the company network from, storage and equipment destruction policies, and more. But what about the relationship between your cybersecurity an...

“Zero Trust” is a terminology we have in the information technology field that means what it says – you don’t trust anything. Do you know what applications are really on your device, what processes are running, and how they could be exposing you to danger without you seeing or noticing anything? Individual users and companies can get frustrated by Zero Trust policies that m...

You’ve probably saved passwords in your browsers. That’s bad – really bad. REALLY bad. When managed service providers perform cybersecurity assessments, they scan clients’ hard drives for sensitive information and can pull all your passwords without having administrative access to your browser. In this episode, Tom Wyant goes through the features an effective password manag...

Does it feel like you have to jump through flaming hoops just to log into your online accounts for credit cards, memberships, streaming services, website hosting, and more every single time – as if the company is testing you to see how bad you want it? As the owner or manager of a technology company, a SaaS, membership portal, or website, are you finding it increasingly necessary to protect...