This tech tidbit is a reprise of a tidbit we sent out back in June of 2018.   You may have missed this post back then as it was the end of the school year and preparing for summer was upon all of us.  But, I wanted to bring it to all your attention again.

The FBI came to visit us last week.  No it wasn’t an investigation.  It was for CSI’s 3rd annual Security Event.  I have talked about the topic of Cyber Threats in person and on-line, but our Supervisory Special Agent had a few interesting things to say beyond the topics Bob and I have been discussing […]

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.

Trend Micro has stated many times that you have approximately 4 minutes between when a threat enters your network and the infection breaks out. But who can respond that quickly? I have often said if we leave questions on the computer up to our end users, we have failed.

At some point in your life, you probably were locked out of something – your house, your car, your office.  I am sure it was awful trying to figure out how you were going to solve that problem.   However, to add to your stress, we now have all this sensitive data online and on our […]

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 […]

When something goes sideways in our technical worlds some of the first questions we get asked, after “when is XXXX going to be back up”, is “what happened?” and “why did it happen?”   For sure if the event in question is a security or data breach event the urgency to answer these questions ratchets up […]

**Note – Client tech directors in Dutchess County got a preview of this Tuesday so if you are in that group you may skip the rest of this note and go on to your next e-mail.   For the rest of you please read on** On Tuesday, May 29th, I received an updated alert from US-CERT […]

We have been discussing a whole lot of security issues over this past year.  Many of you are already moving forward to address many of our recommendations.   However, some of you are paralyzed in figuring out how to absorb some of the new costs for the new security technologies that your district now absolutely requires […]