As we start the school year, security is once again on everyone’s mind. Recent events have brought significant cyberattacks literally to our doorstep. The pace of these attacks is increasing. After consulting with many area Tech Directors about what was most on their mind, we put our heads together and we are going to go back to some basic, foundational steps you can take to better secure your endpoints and ultimately your network.

Just when you thought it was safe to move along to other technical topics, along comes Scott Quimby's Hardening Active Directory Part III to scare you even more.  If you haven't watched Part I and Part II, you can find them here.

In Part III we will do a little review of some core topics of Active Directory Security plus share some latest information from the front lines in terms of some of the more subtle exposures that are not top of mind that we all need to be defending against.

We hope that you are enjoying the end of your summer.   We wanted to let you know the dates for both the CSI Tech Talk quarterly, free knowledge transfer sessions and the CSI Tech Talk webinars.

These sessions are designed for technical staff responsible for technical support in your organization.

We are so focused on our networks being breached and the bad guys gaining a foothold to steal our money and personally identifiable information that we often forget is that we as techs can make mistakes and inadvertently give away access to sensitive/confidential parts of the network.

The reality is that your network is under attack.  We need to protect our servers.  We need to protect our data.  One way we do that is by not remoting into servers to do basic tasks.   Almost everything we need to do, we can now do remotely.   Also, we can do many tasks with a more limited ID than a true domain admin account.

Our Tech Talk quarterly, free knowledge transfer session is Tuesday, January 15th at 8:00 AM. This session is designed for technical staff responsible for technical support in your organization. Attendees at our previous meetings have given us the highest ratings for the quality of our presentations.

It is important to have accountability to the taxpayers independently proving that each school district has adequate financial controls in place and is properly managing the money it has been entrusted.  In this era of identity theft, ransomware, and electronic financial theft, it is equally important to have adequate technical controls in place to protect your network and your district's private data.

Our Tech Talk quarterly, free knowledge transfer session is Tuesday, October 23rd at 8:00 AM. This session is designed for technical staff responsible for technical support in your organization. Attendees at our previous meetings have given us the highest ratings for the quality of our presentations.

I can't tell how many times I have heard from non-technical Mac people that, "they don't need anti-virus." The Apple person that sold them their Mac told them that. I have pointed out that Apple's technical folks make a strong recommendation for anti-virus in their technical documents despite sales claims to the contrary.

We have to be constantly vigilant to prevent malware, trojans, and other bad actors from taking root in our school networks to steal personally identifiable information (PIA) and money.   Besides web filtering, antivirus, patching, and now advanced endpoint protection, we also have to look at policies.