I think by now everyone is officially open. I know some districts locally and in the Northeast had horrific transportation issues. I heard that the Governor of Massachusetts actually called out the National Guard to drive school buses to ensure that schools could open!
These are crazy times, but we have to be creative and adapt and persevere.
One item on your what's next list is to to "true up" all the work done over the summer to make sure it fits into your normal maintenance, security, and support processes. Here are questions to ask yourself and your team:
- We have spun up new servers and retired old servers. Have we adjusted our backups to reflect those changes? I am seeing some servers without backups. That may be a conscious decision by some, but you should re-visit what servers are being backed up and what servers you have and adjust accordingly.
- Hopefully someone is assigned in your organization to read the backup reports.
- Along the same lines have you turned off *and prevented from turning back on* ALL the servers you migrated but were leaving up "just in case we needed to check something"? I know I have been guilty of that. We all have. However, "Zombie" servers are threats as they are ideal attack surfaces. Kill all the Zombies on your network!
- Have you granted any "temporary" administrator level accounts for the summer, that you forgot to remove? I have horror stories I could tell on this one with schools. Audit your domain admin and administrators groups and local admin groups.
- In our summer work, we retired servers, we added servers. We retired workstations. We added workstations. We re-imaged workstations. Have you re-deployed whatever auditing, antivirus, EDR/XDR, inventory agents, and whatever other specialty agents are required for your security and visibility framework? I always see a lot of gaps where license counts dropped because in the churn, people forgot to put back the advanced clients. Make sure you reconcile all your various systems and look for gaps in visibility.
That is a pretty big list to start the school year. As always, we are happy to assist in any way we can to keep you safe and on track.
Stay vigilant.
Stay safe.
-Scott Quimby |
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