MSPs, Cyber Resilience, and the Human Side of Security with James McMillan

Marc Laliberte  0:00  
Everyone. Welcome back to the 443 security simplified. I'm your host, Mark liberty, and joining me today is

Corey Nachreiner  0:06  
Corey the mountain Nachreiner. Did he get it on the second go?

Marc Laliberte  0:11  
Corey, you are not the I mean, you are eight feet tall,

Corey Nachreiner  0:13  
Hey, I'm drinking protein, just so the audience knows we're doing this from Dubrovnik, which it happens to be old cities where they film King's Landing and Game ofThrones.

Marc Laliberte  0:25  
Make sure you don't get us a copyright Strike.

Corey Nachreiner  0:27  
Oh, I said Game of Thrones. Who do I need to pay?

Marc Laliberte  0:31  
me.

Marc Laliberte  0:32  
Thank you, yeah.

Marc Laliberte  0:33  
Also joining us today is James McMillan from readynet. James,

James McMcMillan  0:36  
yep. How you doing? Good?

Marc Laliberte  0:37  
Great. Really. Happy to have you on too.

Speaker 2  0:39  
Yeah. Glad to be on the famous 443.

Marc Laliberte  0:49  
So today, like Corey said, we're coming to you from Dubrovnik Croatia at WatchGuard's IMPACT Conference, and we've got James on to talk to us all about SMBs and MSP security in the United Kingdom. But before we got

Corey Nachreiner  1:06  
Across the pond, technically, we're across it now.

Marc Laliberte  1:15  
But James, before we jump into any of that, we always start with new guests on the show with what we call the hacker origin story. Yeah, really, it's just what got you into it and cyber security and got you to where you're at right now?

Speaker 2  1:28  
Yeah. I mean, well, it's been a long time. So, so we're 30 years this year actually, same as, same as, yeah, exactly. In fact, we bring in everyone's Croatia as well in July. So that'd be good, but really gradual. The first instance I can think of of a cyber security incident that I was involved with was not even for a customer. I got pulled in to help for what was perceived as a network congestion issue. And it didn't take too long to be honest with you, I turned up. I had novels and analyzer, if you remember that, remember that Corey

Corey Nachreiner  2:11  
second we've talked about...

Speaker 2  2:14  
Had some old guys in here? And I used that and quickly discovered that, I think it was Code Red. Was years ago now, I guess, or running rampant, and -

Marc Laliberte  2:28  
The Mountain Dew flavor?

Corey Nachreiner  2:29  
The Mountain Dew flavor did exist, both as a mountain dew flavor and as Code Red.

Speaker 2  2:35  
Yeah. So I sort of got involved in the in the cleanup of that and and then as soon as we were, soon as we got, sort of the workstations cleaned up and stuff, then it was a case of trying to find out the source, which was also fairly easy to find, actually, because there was a firewall within any any rule to their exchange. Oh, gosh, unpatched on Windows. NT is you have an email

Corey Nachreiner  3:00  
server?

Corey Nachreiner  3:03  
not good enough. Just

Speaker 2  3:04  
yeah. Firewall was unpatched for years. Everything was in something.

Speaker 1  3:10  
Don't

Corey Nachreiner  3:10  
change.

Speaker 2  3:11  
Patch your firewalls, please. Yeah, yeah, exactly that, yeah. So no cyber security for them. Got got pretty real, pretty quickly. I hate to say

Marc Laliberte  3:18  
that even 30 years later, that's still a very real problem

Speaker 1  3:21  
for many,

Marc Laliberte  3:22  
many companies. Unfortunately, absolutely,

Corey Nachreiner  3:24  
I think Code Red was interesting because it was one of the threats that I feel was more business targeted and legit like before that we had things like, I love you and Melissa, which caused businesses issues. Was probably just idiot teenagers doing a prank and not realizing how crazy the prank of a worm could go. Yeah,

Speaker 2  3:43  
exactly.

Corey Nachreiner  3:43  
Code red felt like it was actually targeting business,

Speaker 2  3:46  
actually saying that, I think it was the form virus, which was the first one that I ever came across, and I turned up again. This was in the like, mid 90s. I turned up at a customer, and they had Dr Solomon antivirus toolkit. Still have a floppies for Yeah, and literally, every time they booted it popped up and said form virus kind of thing. And I said, Did you wear this? I said, yeah, it always happens exactly. I don't remember what it did, but yeah,

Marc Laliberte  4:19  
oh my god. So I guess starting or continuing with SMBs, which I'm assuming, these companies that you just were working with, there were smaller size companies too. Yeah, I'm curious, like in modern day, What trends are you seeing or hearing about from MSPs when it comes to cybersecurity and some of their concerns? Maybe, I think the biggest concerns at the moment are probably, probably two, two main concerns, one's, I guess account takeover worries essentially and but isn't everyone using MFA, so no problem. You.

Speaker 2  5:00  
Yeah, so I think identity is is a worry for people, but also, obviously, as everyone knows, over the last couple of years, a lot of organizations are worried about AI, but a lot, but a lot of them aren't quite sure why.

Corey Nachreiner  5:15  
Yeah,

Speaker 2  5:16  
I think yet so that's kind of a journey that

Corey Nachreiner  5:20  
we're so new, but also moving so fast that the learning curve is happening with anxiety,

Speaker 2  5:26  
exactly. And there's, there's a lot of news in the press, and yeah, so they're kind of worried, but

Marc Laliberte  5:32  
even with AI, just in general, like, it's not even just news about the capabilities and, like, the scary new threats it can bring, but it's just there's general unease about AI of like, it's going to take all of our jobs. Is it going to destroy the world?

Speaker 2  5:44  
Yeah, and

Marc Laliberte  5:45  
like that just feeds into it even more. Yeah,

Speaker 2  5:47  
fear gets the most exciting. It's cool. I mean, it's the craziest

Corey Nachreiner  5:53  
thing of cool and with the potential of power, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1  5:57  
You say

Speaker 2  5:58  
that about any technology really. That's great. Vision

Corey Nachreiner  6:01  
fusion,

Speaker 2  6:02  
yeah. Well, you go back to the spinning jenny in the Industrial Revolution. Exactly, all these horses like

Corey Nachreiner  6:10  
that, Ford crap is going

Speaker 2  6:12  
to ruin the world. Exactly,

Marc Laliberte  6:14  
I'm definitely drunk off the AI Kool Aid at this point. Like, I use it all the time for like, software development and like aI assisted development, I literally could not go back to the old ways anymore. It's just turning me into like a superhuman when it comes to

Speaker 2  6:28  
that anything is possible now. It's so cool. Dream it up. It's done. Do it.

Marc Laliberte  6:33  
I'm so what do you think like? So, like, identity is a big concern. AI is obviously a big concern for just every company

Speaker 2  6:43  
when

Marc Laliberte  6:43  
it comes to some of these cybersecurity threats and opportunities that you see with small and mid sized businesses. What do you think separates companies that are doing security very well from the ones that might be kind of struggling

Speaker 2  6:57  
the ones that do security well are those that see cyber security, or InfoSec in general, as a continual improvement, and not just a one off purchase or or project or something like that. I mean, too many times you see, but we, but we bought the new AV software last year. So why do we need to spend more money now, kind of thing. So I think the ones that do, well, see it as a continuing, evolving threat,

Marc Laliberte  7:27  
makes sense. And I mean, we see we get a lot of telemetry, like working with product management too. And there's a lot of people that will go buy a Watchguard firebox, deploy it, and then not even, like, turn on anything too. It just they like, maybe set up one proxy. Don't set up security services, leave it in a closet. Yeah, never patch it. And if you're not giving care to cyber security, like, you are going to very quickly fall behind, yeah,

Corey Nachreiner  7:53  
absolutely. And not just at the fire box, but at the endpoint. But everything, I mean, everything is a touch point for it is a weird dichotomy, because we sell at Watchguard and help you support security technology that's meant to be preventative. Yeah, cool. And we try to make it as automated as possible, because we understand, like you, as MSP support 1000s, maybe 10s of 1000s, of end users, and then the customer, you know, the it there. Their whole point is not to think about security and think about their business. So we wanted to be as automated as possible. But I think to your point, and the reason I want customers to come to MSPs like you is they forget, no matter how good the technology and automated is, security is a humanistic problem. You were talking about identity. We can have the best technology in the world, but there's purely social engineering, phishing, that just trick a user that does MFA to do a stupid thing. You need human and MSP provided services to monitor for that to do it. So we want the technology to be easy and automated. We'll even use AI to do that. But security is not a break fix solution. It's something that you need the partner like you to help them with the humanistic and policy and ongoing business continuity disaster recovery problems that they'll have as well.

Speaker 2  9:10  
Yep, yeah, absolutely, and security awareness training on a regular basis. But really, it can't just be the usual flood of, do this module, do this module. Do this module do this module just for the sake of it, it has to be kind of, you know,

Corey Nachreiner  9:23  
something that actually caters to their business and cuts through the noise, exactly

Marc Laliberte  9:28  
that. Like even internally at Watchguard, as a cybersecurity company, like we found that the custom trainings that we do get so much more engagement than just the whatever module from whatever platform are using,

Speaker 2  9:40  
yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, we're so we're like you with ISO 27 double Oh, one. We have been since 2013 I think so, quite a while now. So it's pretty well established. But yeah, as part of that, you need to do regular security awareness training. And funnily enough, I've just revamped our. Presentation for everybody to include a bit of AR and everything else.

Speaker 1  10:03  
But

Corey Nachreiner  10:03  
Mark mentioned that, because we're literally, I just finished a custom video for the watch guard folks to go with our other training.

Speaker 2  10:09  
Oh, really, are you doing internal videos?

Corey Nachreiner  10:11  
Yes, for did not want to release it. It's one specifically to train our users on our Paul, but I think your ISO 2701 is a perfect point. And if we have both gone through that compliance so we know, sure, there's technology controls and sampling they do, but 90% of it is policy and things that you have to do beyond the control. So it's just really important for customers of MSPs to know that the services are as important as the products that protect them

Speaker 2  10:39  
absolutely, and governance like that is really important, and so many see it as a checkbox exercise, but it

Speaker 1  10:46  
can

Speaker 2  10:46  
genuinely improve your business.

Corey Nachreiner  10:48  
And more

Speaker 2  10:48  
than just the cyber security front, it will make you more efficient. You'll end up having processes for things you didn't even realize you needed processes for

Corey Nachreiner  10:56  
the governance seems boring, but it forces visibility into places people forget and visit without visibility. You You don't have security Exactly,

Marc Laliberte  11:05  
yeah, so we already you already mentioned AI is like, one of the big trends you're hearing customers about, talk about how has, like, the conversation been changing with some of your customers over time? Because, like, the technology is today totally different than it was six months ago, and just night and day from three years ago,

Speaker 2  11:24  
it's going to be changed again in six months, I expect. So. So how's that? How's the conversation changed? Well, I think that certainly in a lot of organizations, the kind of the management layer, I guess sometimes sitting behind the users, which is a problem because the users are using AI in their personal time. They're using chat, GPT three, or Claude, or whatever it might be. And the worry is that, of course, they are going to start using those tools to make their work life a little bit easier, because the organizations haven't, quite yet got the governance in place, because it's

Corey Nachreiner  12:08  
standardized. If they haven't given a standard tool set to use safely, people are going to do it themselves.

Speaker 2  12:14  
Yeah, exactly that. So I mean, organizations are generally tend to be slower moving than the user base sometimes. So so we've been having a lot of conversations around that, and we've actually been putting together some round tables for our customers hosted at Microsoft, which is really good, where we kind of have a frank and open discussion on AI, the governance aspect of it, how we can trick can control agents and users and give the agents identities and, you know, and apply our back to them role based, access, that kind of thing, as well as, as well as, kind of try and inspire them a little bit and show them the kind of use cases. Cool, essentially, but it's really good, really engaging. What

Corey Nachreiner  12:59  
is their adoption level between like we talked you just talked about two things. You talked about what I consider Gen AI, like llms, that users are using on their own, in a way, if they're not leaking data for a good thing, because it adds efficiency and productivity of the business if they do it right. But then there's the, I think more powerful and cool agentic AI. You were talking about agents, but both, it sounds like we all agree all of that is innovative and cool. Agentic AI adds those MCP servers, and you have to start worrying about data. So how are you handling, I mean, one, where's the adoption level on agentic versus Gen AI? And how are you handling a security with

Speaker 2  13:38  
interesting question. So I think for the most part, our customers are pretty involved in the Microsoft ecosystem already. So for the most part, those that are embarking on that journey have bought into the Microsoft 365 copilot, essentially, and of course, within the 365, and as your platform, you've got some really good controls in terms of what users cannot

Speaker 1  14:08  
you

Corey Nachreiner  14:08  
do have to know how to set them, and can calculate

Speaker 2  14:10  
exactly, exactly that. But, I mean, you know, you can set blueprints up so they, you know, users can only use a certain number of connectors that have been approved by you, and so on. And there's an agent registry, for example, so you can get a handle on all of the agents that folk have been using or whatever. But the difficult one is going to be, still really those users that are going to go outside of that ecosystem and start looking at Claude or whatever, and they're going to start deploying

Speaker 1  14:44  
their

Speaker 2  14:45  
own random MCP servers that they found on GitHub. Are going to do, God knows,

Corey Nachreiner  14:49  
open, close, one gets a lot of buzzworthy, yes, but you might want to limit it internally until

Speaker 1  14:54  
you

Speaker 2  14:54  
even on a basic sort of agentic level, I suppose. Microsoft have introduced, you know, Agent mode, or it's changed. They've changed the name now, but how many times the last three months, exactly. But you know, so that they're using anthropic models now within Word and Excel and so on, to do the work for you. Rather than give you the instructions, they'll do the work for you. And, my God, it saves hours. Yes,

Corey Nachreiner  15:24  
if you're not using it, you bet you're

Speaker 2  15:26  
late

Marc Laliberte  15:27  
starting the learning curve. My favorite one, I built a, call it my Chief of Staff. It's a it's a copilot agent, where every morning, it goes and summarizes all my emails from overnight, tells me which ones are like, I'm a blocker for something I have to go address. Which ones are really important. Really important, and gives me, like, a meeting summary and agenda for the day.

Speaker 2  15:46  
Yeah, it's been

Marc Laliberte  15:46  
super helpful for me, yeah. And actually, so one of my favorite things, like last time we talked, was in person. It was a while ago, and I remember you told me about in your home automation, you set up this thing, like, take the weather report and build, like, an AI generated image for it.

Speaker 2  16:02  
Yeah, yeah.

Marc Laliberte  16:03  
I'm curious, like, just giving you a second to nerd out, like, what's your favorite application for AI lately you've been using?

Speaker 2  16:11  
Probably, coding. I'm not a developer, but I've got, I know enough to be dangerous. So no, I mean, I can, I can, I can, kind of get by with, you know, basics such as Python and so on. But over the last since Codex dropped for back OS, back in February, I can't tell you how many little apps I've created just to make my life easier. I wanted to animate our logo for our signature, and I must have spent about an hour and a half one Saturday night trying to find tools online to help me do that, and I just thought, I'll build my own then. So Codex helped me build an app to animate an SVG and convert it into animated

Corey Nachreiner  16:53  
png about

Speaker 2  16:54  
half an hour. So

Corey Nachreiner  16:55  
it's funny how many stay at home fathers and wives I know that are like now they have a product idea, and they create it and launch it without knowing any of the technology behind it.

Speaker 2  17:07  
It's like it says, I just want time to be alive. I feel it's a new lease of life. To be honest with you, I'm back to the I'm back to the old days of in my 20s, of kind of tinkering till sort of one o'clock in the

Corey Nachreiner  17:18  
morning. That's

Speaker 2  17:19  
awesome. It's good fun.

Marc Laliberte  17:20  
So I think I can probably guess the answer. But I'm curious from you, like, do you think AI is more of an opportunity or more of a threat right now for businesses?

Speaker 2  17:28  
It's both, Yeah, same with any new tech. There's always, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, kind of thing. So it's, it's as much as an adversary as it is, kind of a knight in shining armor, to be honest with you, you can use AI to sift through logs or telemetry or whatever it might be, to look for anomalies as well as you can. I mean, we spoke about, I won't, I won't give the name, but we spoke about an MCP server last time we were here, I think, and it incorporates almost every tool in Cali. Essentially, we're just natural language. I can just say

Speaker 1  18:16  
yeah,

Corey Nachreiner  18:17  
and

Speaker 2  18:17  
it'll figure everything out itself. So you know, don't even need script kit is anymore to be doing this.

Marc Laliberte  18:23  
Don't even need you to say, Go, just plug like open, claw into it. Give it purpose, and it will go.

Speaker 2  18:29  
It

Corey Nachreiner  18:31  
sounds like it's an opportunity you can't ignore. It's something that, because it is adversary, like, the power of it is obvious, yeah, and if you're ignoring it, you're going to miss out on where the world's going. And because of that, you do have to pay attention to the potential adversarial side too.

Speaker 2  18:53  
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you got with it, or you get left behind.

Marc Laliberte  18:56  
And but even, like you mentioned your own, like, vibe coding projects like you at least you can hang you understand there's a lot of people out there that don't consider the security ramifications of what they're doing. Vibe code, something out, put it in production, and now ticking time bomb. Yeah.

Speaker 2  19:12  
I mean, I'm pretty boring about it, so in I've got prompts I use before every kind of vibe coding projects which kind of instructs the model to create several documentation files in terms of, you know, it will, it will log, you know, what kind of data I'm touching, what connectors I'm using, where the data is stored. Why is it stored? And all that kind of business I'm kind of, yeah. And the first thing, I mean, I've been building an MCP server for fun, really just as an experiment. But before I even got into any functionality, I kind of embedded some role based access into it and intro ID authentication to it. Because, you know,

Corey Nachreiner  19:53  
at watch code, we do some spec based AI coding that, you know, one, it generates better code. You can also put guardrails around things too. We've

Marc Laliberte  20:02  
also, like, we found made our own implementation within so I'm not sure if you're familiar with spec based development for like vibe coding to the max, where walk through the whole process, but we've added our own extensions to even put like Threat Modeling into it,

Speaker 2  20:17  
too. Oh, nice. We're

Marc Laliberte  20:18  
like, as our development teams are creating a new feature, one of the very first steps is like, what is the threat model for this feature? So we understand how we have to secure it too. Yeah,

Speaker 2  20:27  
and

Marc Laliberte  20:28  
that's been helpful, because in the past, that's a very difficult technical skill, like security, technical skill

Speaker 2  20:33  
to

Marc Laliberte  20:34  
even train, like very smart engineers

Corey Nachreiner  20:37  
just

Marc Laliberte  20:38  
and now it just makes it easy as

Speaker 2  20:39  
well. Basically, skills you're using Exactly? Yeah.

Marc Laliberte  20:44  
So, like, we've talked a lot about SMBs, a lot about personal projects, but like, from the MSP side, managing security, it goes both ways. You're responsible for your customers. You're also responsible for your own house, because if something impacts you, the potential breadth of damage is massive in some cases.

Speaker 2  21:02  
Yeah,

Marc Laliberte  21:03  
I'm curious, like, what are some of the biggest challenges that you think MSPs, like you are facing right now within the UK

Speaker 2  21:12  
in terms of protecting our own environment? You mean, or do you mean you're

Corey Nachreiner  21:16  
protecting your own environment?

Speaker 2  21:18  
Yeah, well, I mean, we're an organization like any other really same as you guys, same as our end users. Have customers as well. So

Corey Nachreiner  21:28  
you mentioned you have ISO, it's like, yeah, exactly, your customer

Speaker 2  21:33  
exactly. And we take that really seriously to the to the extent that when it comes to auditing our own policies, for example, I won't be the one that audits, you know, network management or any of that kind of aspect. So we can't exactly that. So we don't mark, we don't mark our own homework, essentially. So someone else, because someone else in the organization that doesn't necessarily have the same expertise in the area, will ask questions that you never even imagined could be asked. So that's that. And also, we're big proponents of cyber Central's plus, which is more kind of technically focused based controls, which is, which is good, and UK,

Marc Laliberte  22:12  
as like developed in the UK, right?

Speaker 2  22:15  
Yeah, exactly, by the NCSC, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's government backed, and I think it should become mandatory to be honest with you for organizations, because if you do it on a continual basis, it doesn't have to be that much

Speaker 1  22:31  
effort.

Speaker 2  22:31  
And if you take it seriously, and it's not just a checkbox exercise, you can stop probably 75 80% of the most common threats, which is,

Corey Nachreiner  22:43  
there's an Australian version, where they had, now I'm talking about an old Commonwealth, kind of related to UK, but they have their government's cyber essentials, but they have something also called the essential eight,

Speaker 2  22:56  
right?

Corey Nachreiner  22:56  
Which is really good for SMBs, because it takes this, you know, thing that probably has 50 controls and lots of things, and it takes it to the eight controls that cover over 80% of the most common attacks. So I love things like cyber essentials from the NSC. But did that little mini one, which gives small businesses that may not be able to concentrate on everything? Yeah, here are the ones that have the most cool

Speaker 2  23:22  
Anything helps and spoilers. I think the probably the most efficient way of getting organizations serious is going to be a push from insurance companies.

Corey Nachreiner  23:30  
No, yeah,

Speaker 2  23:31  
honestly, I think government line and because a number of people that

Corey Nachreiner  23:36  
they paid the ransom, but they got bit by paying the ransom, and they realize that. So, yeah, they're forcing their customers to get the right security so they don't have to pay their medicine. Well,

Marc Laliberte  23:46  
exactly that, but even, but even then, if, if, if a company buys cyber, cyber insurance and they're negligent, they're not going to pay. So, yeah. So yeah, I imagine you probably deal with a lot of, like, cyber insurance questionnaires too, on behalf of your customers, or even within readynet, I don't know about you, like for us, we've seen just them skyrocket, and the depth that they are going into, not even just asking, but even validating, in many cases too, doing their own penetration tests and external attack surface assessments.

Speaker 2  24:20  
Exactly. In fact I was gonna, I was gonna speak to that. That's a trend that we have seen. Is the number of security questionnaires has been on the rise gradually, for sure. And some of them simply ask, are you 27 double oh one, and some of them ask half the questions from 27 level one, which is, which is my preferred method, because I always think

Corey Nachreiner  24:44  
I prefer if they ask the first. Like our process, we get the questionnaires all the time, but we also everyone's part of the supply chain. So we require any vendor we use our team will go through validation of them and our processes. If you have ISO, 2701 or SOC two, type two, with an appropriate scope, with an appropriate scope of what we're using, we're going to have a tiny subset of questions in addition. And if you don't, then we're going to send you a questionnaire that you're going to have to answer. So getting that compliance saves time for everyone. Yeah, but

Speaker 2  25:20  
I mean, we've also seen people that are 27 level oh one, seven level

Corey Nachreiner  25:23  
one who don't

Speaker 2  25:24  
do so I'm all in favor of certainly checking for accreditations, but I like to ask the individual questions.

Speaker 1  25:32  
That's

Corey Nachreiner  25:33  
good too.

Speaker 2  25:33  
That way

Corey Nachreiner  25:34  
I do pay attention. We follow PCI, and I think PCI has some more stringent requirements than ISO, 2701 so it all depends, yeah, but it is a nice shortcut. It's at least a language you can understand that they must have the basics, at least in governance, to be able to get this at all.

Speaker 2  25:52  
Yeah.

Marc Laliberte  25:53  
What do you think? So, you're very entirely UK focused, but when you look across like Europe as a whole, though, I'm curious, what do you think, like maybe the UK is doing better or more mature on than other places in the region, like the cyber essentials, plus, is one of the areas I think the UK is actually leading pretty well in.

Speaker 2  26:14  
Yeah. I mean, although the Europeans have had this too, right? So confusing

Marc Laliberte  26:22  
state, the implementation

Marc Laliberte  26:25  
desired? Yeah,

Speaker 2  26:28  
exactly. Although we are, we are due to receive the cyber resilience Bill was kind of the loose ish equivalent, I guess. So Europeans doing, well, I don't know if, I don't know if any European countries individually have anything such as cyber essentials for the kind of

Marc Laliberte  26:47  
I haven't seen it anywhere else. That's definitely an area the UK is. It's also interesting seeing things like GDPR and CRA then make their way into the UK. Yeah, since technically you're not a part of that party anymore, and so you have to figure it out on your own.

Speaker 2  27:02  
Exactly. Yeah,

Marc Laliberte  27:05  
but interesting when it comes to like companies working with service providers like you, like I imagine you see a lot of different maturity levels from the companies you work with, even the partners you work with, maybe the vendors you work with. How do you think that organizations should improve their like collaboration with partners with different maturity

Speaker 2  27:30  
levels, too. Do you know what we work with? We work with a couple of distributors, actually, one of which I won't, I won't name any of them, but they hold regular kind of best practice Academy sessions, if you like. And they think

Speaker 1  27:50  
I've

Marc Laliberte  27:50  
even helped post one of those before, or participate in one of them. If it's the distributor I'm thinking of,

Speaker 2  27:56  
it's not the one you're thinking, oh no, there are two. Then that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so they're pretty cool, they're pretty open about what they do, and they're kind

Corey Nachreiner  28:05  
of like sharing in the portfolio they have a lot. Exactly, it should be a community. Let's bring us together and learn from each other, because we're all part of this. Exactly,

Speaker 1  28:13  
yeah, I

Speaker 2  28:14  
think that's

Marc Laliberte  28:15  
important too, because it is, like it's a group effort at the end of the day, like there's responsibility on the end user, the company, the service provider, the vendor, the distributor. And like, when an incident happens, it goes all the way up the chain of people trying to address it

Speaker 2  28:30  
exactly. It's called a chain for a reason. So one link fails and the whole thing falls, right? So

Marc Laliberte  28:36  
it makes sense to, like, act collectively to try and prevent that from occurring, and like a little bit of investment from working with distributors or service providers can go a long way to just help secure the entire chain. Yeah, and here's

Speaker 2  28:48  
an idea for you. Actually one of the best sessions at a conference I saw a couple of years ago now was the CISO literally walked us through a day in his life, essentially. So which, aside from roadmaps and everything else, it really gave the audience an idea of what they were doing right, what they were doing maybe wrong, or just ways to help improve their day. So he'd tell us, you know, seven o'clock I get up, eight o'clock, I'm checking the news feeds by state, I'm checking the portals, then have a meeting with the team to find out what's happened overnight, if anything, and so on. So that kind of insight

Corey Nachreiner  29:30  
that's cool

Speaker 1  29:31  
from

Speaker 2  29:31  
folklore.

Speaker 1  29:32  
It'd be fun and easy to

Corey Nachreiner  29:33  
do, because we all know that day, yeah,

Speaker 2  29:36  
yeah, we should

Marc Laliberte  29:36  
do something like that. And with you, it can start with, well, at 6am I wake up and play some beat saber

Corey Nachreiner  29:42  
beat sabers after work. The first thing is they learned in our previous

Speaker 2  29:47  
podcast.

Corey Nachreiner  29:50  
Do you play expert plus? Oh,

Marc Laliberte  29:52  
it depends on the

Corey Nachreiner  29:55  
tune.

Marc Laliberte  30:00  
I think I can play maybe beginner on some of those,

Speaker 1  30:04  
but

Marc Laliberte  30:04  
I don't know. Just

Speaker 2  30:05  
got to dedicate some time to

Marc Laliberte  30:06  
it. Yeah, that's a I got to find some time to get dedicated to it. Corey makes it the workout, and so you make time for it. When you

Speaker 2  30:14  
get old lock Corey, you got to kind of get

Corey Nachreiner  30:18  
off the couch.

Marc Laliberte  30:20  
Very true anyway. So rounding out, though, like, just to close things up, from your perspective, like you operate at a pretty high maturity level within your organization, you already mentioned 27,001 ISO certification, which, like many of our partners, haven't, not, I wouldn't say many, some of our partners haven't even reached that level.

Speaker 2  30:39  
And something for the partners out there, especially in the UK, the cyber resilience bill, they are going to be covered. So So I mean, we started doing a sort of gap analysis, even though it hasn't been ratified yet. And yeah, and actually, one comes a huge part of it. So

Corey Nachreiner  30:55  
we have three months to get our vulnerability disclosure process super freaking fast that it changes that quite a bit.

Marc Laliberte  31:03  
I'm curious like, what advice would you offer other leaders in the space to try and address just modern cybersecurity threats?

Speaker 2  31:11  
I would suggest a lot of casual reading, listening, watching, of podcasts like yourselves. Corey, you gave me a few years ago a hint to [email protected]

Corey Nachreiner  31:23  
my aggregator. That's the actual first thing I do in the morning. That was

Speaker 2  31:27  
that you told me that probably seven, eight years ago or something. And I look at that every, every morning. So yeah, so

Corey Nachreiner  31:33  
I do pay for it now. So I don't say, Wait for a

Speaker 2  31:36  
second.

Corey Nachreiner  31:38  
Smart of them,

Speaker 2  31:39  
if you just, you just spend even sort of like 15 minutes just browsing through through those in the morning or the evening or something, then you gradually get a great idea and understanding of the trends that are

Marc Laliberte  31:53  
happening. So important to stay plugged in and, like you said, see the trends and like, understand exactly what attackers are focusing on, at any given time, vertical technique, whatever we're

Corey Nachreiner  32:03  
talking to a German based partner, and like your MS, your your existence, is to take away the thought of it and security from them. So if there is a big attack in the news, the difference between your customers seeing it and having to call you versus the fact that you've taken the time to look at it, and you're actively saying, hey, you'll see this big exchange zero day. We have you covered. Here's how, that's what they're looking for.

Speaker 2  32:30  
We don't have anyone using exchange

Speaker 1  32:32  
anymore.

Speaker 2  32:33  
You get the gist? I totally get the gist. Yeah. And in fact, when something big hits the media, and now we get questions on it. So in fact, for our customer base that uses advanced epdr from watch God now elite, we use your Orion threat hunting platform to literally go on the search and get questions, get questions answered before they come in. So,

Marc Laliberte  33:02  
yeah, super powerful.

Speaker 2  33:04  
Really, good.

Marc Laliberte  33:05  
That's good.

Corey Nachreiner  33:05  
And by the way, it'd be news when you come out here with things like gray or AI, things like threat hunting, well, we'll be able to help you there too.

Speaker 2  33:13  
Absolutely

Corey Nachreiner  33:14  
And earlier you're talking about your customers concerns with shadow, a shadow, AI, yeah, and maybe controlling things like your configuration of copilot and 365 so big announcement has probably happened by the time they hear this, but we have a new product. Heard about it yesterday, and it's exciting stuff. Yeah,

Marc Laliberte  33:32  
awesome. Well, James, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. It's fun to finally have you as a guest on the podcast. A long time coming. I feel like,

Speaker 2  33:41  
yeah, we've spoken a lot over the years and we but yeah, it's been a lifelong dream to be on the 443,

Corey Nachreiner  33:48  
we're humbled.

Marc Laliberte  33:49  
Thank you.

Marc Laliberte  33:50  
Me and

Corey Nachreiner  33:58  
Mark need some

Marc Laliberte  33:59  
perfect Thank you, James. We appreciate it.

Marc Laliberte  34:05  
Well, hey everyone, thanks again for listening. As always, if you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to rate review and subscribe and tell Joe how amazing it is to have finally been a part of stars. Yeah, but thanks again for listening. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us on blue sky, and it's marked at me core. Is it? Sec? Depth, sec adept. Both of us are on Instagram at watch guard underscore technologies. No one listens this far in the episode anyway, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, but thanks again for listening. You will hear from us next week.

Corey Nachreiner  34:36  
Peace.