Up Times
In cybersecurity sometimes being kept out means things are as they should be
Welcome to my access nightmare – I dragged my laptop around a couple of cities, intending at some point to do some work. I finally tried to log in at a hotel – after now several days of not logging in. I was about to work when a dialog box to connect to the VPN barred me and asked me for my rarely-used credentials, because my session had long ago timed out. The inconvenience! I really felt that “no.”
And when I noticed my aggravation, I realized how I had wanted that “no” to be there. And while still annoyed, I was also reassured that the process was (a bit) difficult (I did locate the password and got in) – to keep anyone else from gaining access to my stuff. “No” meant security. This “no” was actually a “yes.”
This tension had me thinking more broadly about what makes good IT. Because as far as the ability to obtain networking and cybersecurity tools, it’s a pretty level field. So if the tools (and therefore the pricing) are similar why would you choose one IT provider versus another?
A good IT partner’s role is to give the right “nos” and the right “yeses.” How can you tell what are the right “nos” and “yeses?” The “nos” should help keep your organization from going a dangerous direction. In this way the “nos” support your organization’s strategy. Think of the right “nos” like guard-rails for the sake of long-term achievement.
The right “yeses” support your strategy. They minimize disruptions. And, well, nearly the first thing I ever heard from Bryley’s founder Gavin Livingstone were the words you can do this. It was clearly memorable and a good tell of Bryley’s approach to IT – confident “yeses” when it matters to help an organization accomplish its goals.
The hotel room was a microcosm of good IT – a strategic “no” that protected and a “yes” (at the right credentials) to let me do my work.
Rhododendrons are now readying next spring’s flowers. Similarly can you use this October to restart the work of improving your organization’s cybersecurity for 2026?
Taking stock during Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Recalibrate before year’s end
Georgetown professor Cal Newport argues that not January, but the fall is the right time to start new projects, recommit to goals and check in on initiatives that are still at the ‘to-do’ stage and still feel important.
In this spirit here is a list of five things you can do now to improve your cybersecurity defenses. Perhaps you already have some of these things in place – October is a good time to take stock of how your organization is doing in these areas. As an example, CIO Magazine reports that more than 30% of IT managers believe their businesses are experiencing cloud-subscription creep – maybe services are redundant or just no longer used … [8 min. read] Continue Reading >
How often do you think about what’s behind the electrical outlet on your wall?
Awfully quiet
‘How do I know it’s working?’
A large part of Bryley’s mission is to make computer systems function so that the organizations that hire us can just go about their work with as few tech-related interruptions as possible. (The other large part is strategic consulting to optimize computer systems to help an organization achieve its goals.)
When you flip on a light, you expect it to work. Who considers the wiring in the walls, the breakers, the transformer outside the building, the larger transformer down the street, the overall grid? Electricity was meant to just work and around here it does. It’s invisible and reliable. And that’s how an organization’s IT systems should be, too. Turning on machines, checking emails, sending emails, opening files, accessing client records, etc. It should all just work.
How do you value the electrical system that’s there when you expect it to be? Likewise how do you justify the ongoing cost of maintaining and monitoring a system that looks to be running on its own? [6 min. read] Continue Reading >
The goal is resilience, per MIT Sloan. It works best when an organization has whole company buy-in to evade the criminal activity that ends 60% of smaller businesses. Bryley can help you navigate these concepts.
How to get the big picture on small-business cyberthreats
A lot packed into a little article
The main principles these profs and researchers suggest are:
- taking a measure of what’s at risk and the volume of attacks (like those that show up in employee inboxes)
- developing a culture that takes online security seriously (including an example from Newton’s Liberty Mutual)
- having fallback plans should things go wrong
[7 min. read] mitsloan.mit.edu
Running networked equipment? CISA offers a system to help cut the risk of cyber-attackers exploiting this kind of machinery’s vulnerabilities
New CISA guidance for cutting risks associated with networked equipment
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has authored guidance to help manufacturers and industrial companies inventory their production equipment. If your business uses machinery, sensors or control systems connected to a network, this guidance offers an approach to catalog these assets in order to reduce cybersecurity risk.
By following a framework like this, organizations identify the systems that are most critical to their operations. This can point the way to setting their cybersecurity defense priorities and lead to improved incident response – to help move toward the best possible uptime … [3 min. read] mbtmag.com (Manufacturing Business Technology)
Meta reveals that AI interactions will guide ad personalizations
A new privacy issue that will affect a billion users
As additional confirmation of the FTC report from last year warning about the unexpected use of user data in social media companies – Meta’s updated User Agreement allows the company to target ads based on users’ various interactions with its AI implementations.
Yes, this kind of targeting can be understood as bringing convenience (Meta’s argument), but the more data collected, the more vulnerable the user. And as the FTC showed, this collected data is liberally shared with third parties – well beyond users’ understanding.
Bryley can guide and provide structure for reasonable ways to integrate chatbots into a business setting … [3 min. read] wersm.com
Microsoft’s goal may be to give better results, but options have the potential to increase data exposure
Microsoft Copilot and AI engines give signs of change
What to watch for
Microsoft is broadening which AI models are behind GitHub Copilot (a coding assistant for developers). Copilot was originally strictly powered by ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI (Microsoft has invested $13 billion into OpenAI). Now Microsoft GitHub offers users the choice of using Anthropic’s Claude AI alongside some OpenAI models.
There are signs that similar changes may be coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot (OpenAI is negotiating its independence from Microsoft, for example).
As Microsoft’s AI evolves it’s important to monitor the data handling and vendor relationships – like on whose servers your data is residing.
This is a good time to review your Copilot configuration and see that safeguards are in place. Bryley is available to discuss how Microsoft’s changing AI implementations impact your data governance … [5 min. read] theverge.com (paywall)
A form-factor that has issues
Look out below
“When a person’s fingertips are anesthetized, a seven-second task of picking up and lighting a match stretches to nearly 30 seconds of fumbling” iRobot co-founder and MIT professor Rodney Brooks explains. He warns that vision-based humanoid robots won’t achieve human-like dexterity any time soon: current robotic approaches ignore the 17,000 mechanoreceptors in human hands that enable precise manipulation.
Beyond the dexterity problem, Brooks expresses a serious safety concern: when you double a robot’s size, its mass increases by a factor of eight, meaning a falling full-size humanoid has eight times the kinetic energy of a half-size version. So he recommends staying at least ten feet back from walking humanoids due to the severe injury risk from their balance systems.
These challenges in sensing and physical safety make it virtually impossible for current bipedal humanoids to get certified for deployment in health care situations or manufacturing zones shared with human workers … [4 min. read] arstechnica.com
Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.
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