Cybertraps Podcast

Bryant Lee
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the cyber traps podcast. I am Jethro Jones. Your host. You can find me on all the social networks at Jethro Jones. The cyber chaps podcast is a proud member. Of the be podcast network. You can see all of our shows at two B podcast. dot network. And today on the show we have. A special interview from the inch 360 conference.

That's the inland Northwest cybersecurity hub. They put on a conference each year and I have the great fortune of being able to go. Go to that conference. And interview a bunch of people. So that's what you're going to hear on this episode. I hope you enjoy it. And if you want. To learn more about inch 360, go to inch 360 dot O R G.

Alright, so Bryant, welcome to the Cybertraps podcast. We're here at the Inch360 conference. Thank you for being here and being a supporter of it. Uh, why don't you start by telling us about xBabylon and what you all do.

Yeah, so xBabylon is a full [00:01:00] service managed services provider.

And we provide, uh, Basically anything on the cyber security in the IT realm for lots of different organizations ranging from healthcare to Department of Defense organizations, legal, pretty much you name it. We're there to help out with IT help desk, with cyber security issues, or just filling gaps in Microsoft knowledge, you name it.

If it's IT, if it's technology, we're there for it.

And so what does that mean when it's a managed service provider? Like what do you actually do with that?

So, at the end of the day, it really just means that I have a staff that's capable of handling any of your IT needs. And depending on the size of your organization and what your needs are, either we can fill in gaps, or we can be your entire IT team.

Where you call in, you've got our help desk, we're helping you out right away, hopping on your computer, working with you. Or, maybe we just fill in those gaps, you need somebody to help with firewalls, you need somebody that's just heavy hitting on cyber security, and we can fill that gap for you as well.

And so IT hasn't always been done this way. And, [00:02:00] and it's something that, seems more and more necessary now because cybersecurity is such a real issue that impacts everybody day to day. Even if you're a small one or two person business, there's still potential for hacks and things like that.

And when should a company decide that they need something more than just me doing it myself?

It's really down to how much risk you're willing to take. If you're willing to take lots of risk, and you're capable of at least supplying yourself with your day to day necessities, you don't necessarily need an IT team to support you.

But the second that you say, I'm not willing to accept these risks anymore, even tiny risks, you should really be working with at least a consultant, a one man shop, or a full scale IT firm like what we are. It doesn't matter, but whoever you work with should put cyber security at the forefront and always keep in mind the needs of your organization and not just the strict cyber security needs.

and what a lot of people. [00:03:00] are putting up with a lot of risk because they just don't know about it, right?

They don't know that this is a potential threat. So where, where does that line exist for you and the people you work with?

the truth is most organizations are going to be exposed to the same sets of risks. Most risks these days are What we call drive by attacks, where you just happen to somehow get on an emailing list and attacks are sent to you via email It's not even usually targeted attacks.

Those are prevalent. Those do happen, especially with the rise of AI based attacks But it's so easy to just have a drive by attack that hits you and the second that you do click on one of those things You're now on a different list that puts you in that priority target list because you fell for it once You're probably gonna fall for it again So as far as real risks, obviously major businesses, major enterprise, or those that carry key data, healthcare and stuff like that are going to be under a lot more targeted attacks.

But even a one to two person business, small mom and pop shops, you're [00:04:00] going to be subjected to most of the same risks in the form of just a drive by attack, hitting your email, you click on the wrong thing one time, you click on an ad, whatever it is. And now your data is their data. Now your data is the world's data.

And, does that matter to you? I don't know. But, at the end of the day, a lot of your business is gonna be in your data. Your finances, your employee health data, your employee personal information data, social security numbers, a lot more data that's important lives in your environment than you might think about on the daily.

And, and that piece is really important to think about also that you may feel like, Oh, this isn't that big a deal. I don't have much, but there is a lot that you do have that you need to be protecting, in an effective way. So I recently registered a new website, bigimpactmixer. com because I do these big impact mixers and have people come in and talk about how they're making a big impact.

And once I registered that domain name, I was hosting that on a different website, that was a subdomain of something else, but once I [00:05:00] switched it over to that new domain name, then I started getting all these, uh, email signups on my email list, and all these, people emailing, whatever, at bigimpactmixer.

com, trying to get into my email, like these drive by attacks that you're talking about, and once something gets registered like that, then, you know, it, People find out about it and it starts getting all this other kind of stuff and like I'm not doing anything deep or technical or or Have any anybody's real information on there besides just an email list But I can see already that those drive by attacks are Happening and that happens every time I register a new email address or anything.

I get put on these lists automatically Is there anything you can do to stop those things?

There are some things that can be done to reduce that a little bit. Um, proper email filtering is important. With regards to a website, making sure that your website is secured properly and any submission forms on there [00:06:00] are secured and often behind a cap show or something like that can help reduce those drive bys.

But again, with the rise of AI, a lot of that stuff can now be worked around pretty easily. And these bad guys, they have tools just like us good guys have. At least, I think I'm a good guy. and, and they've literally got subscription services on the dark web for some of these tools. Where they just pay a subscription, they've got support teams behind them and everything else.

It's very hard to not get something like this happening. The biggest thing you can do is awareness. Knowing what is and what isn't a risk. Being cognizant of how you Click on things what you click on and stuff like that and then having some form of monitoring of that email address You know if you're using one of the big platforms for like Google Workspace for email or Microsoft 365 They all typically have like risky login detection stuff and things like that And if you don't know what those are if you don't know how to look for those because that's not your specialization [00:07:00] Then you're probably missing a lot of key cyber security stuff You And that is where having a team or a person or a service to help pay attention to those and perform remediation on that can be huge.

But again, most of those tools are built into those things and if you've got the curiosity and are willing to go looking for that, there's free available training through both of those platforms to find it, to learn more, to educate yourself. And at the end of the day, just knowing what the threats are is, is half the battle here.

So, tell us about why xBabylon is here at Inge360 and why this is important to you guys.

We've seen that the Inland Northwest in a lot of ways lags behind the rest of the world in technology and technology adoption over the years. We do a lot of person to person business, human to human business still.

We're a close community and there's lots of interpersonal ties. And with that, A lot of these threats for a long time kind of skated [00:08:00] over us, because a lot of people would focus on larger metro areas and things like that, but we're getting bigger here, and with the ever increasing rise in health care and aerospace and things like that in our area, It's really started to, to ratchet our local area up in that priority list a little bit and being part of a community of, of cyber experts and helping bring that awareness to the region, helping bring that, that thought leadership and helping to just find new people to become part of that community, to help strengthen our community and bring more, honestly, more cool things to our area is, is a huge benefit.

a rising tide lifts all boats.

Absolutely. I, I appreciate that perspective and think that that's what I've seen as well. All right, Brian, how can people get in touch with X Babylon and with you and learn more about what you do?

Uh, the easiest way is just going to our website. it's x Babylon. com and that's E X B A B Y L O N. com. Not just an X. and, uh, we have, some forms on there to reach out to us.

[00:09:00] Uh, we are also present on LinkedIn and Twitter. X, as it's called these days, I guess. uh, reaching out to us through that, uh, you'll get in contact with us. We're local people. You're gonna be talking with real people.

You're not talking with somebody that's in a giant call center or anything like that. You're talking to people that are part of our community. And we'll be reaching out to you and, and having a real communication. All

right. Thank you. Appreciate it, Bryant. Thanks for being here.