PR: Sophos Named the Only Leader Across MDR, XDR, EDR, Endpoint Protection, and Firewall by G2

OXFORD, United Kingdom, April 05, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, today announced it is named the only Leader across the G2 Grid® Reports for Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Platforms, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Endpoint Protection Suites, and Firewall Software in the G2 Spring 2023 Reports. These categories include the enterprise, mid-market and small business segments, and rankings are based on validated customer reviews.

“As adversaries become more sophisticated and elusive, defenders at organizations of all sizes should implement a defense-in-depth strategy that includes protection, detection and response at every point along the attack chain and covers their entire environment. This layered approach should be inclusive of endpoint security, network security, email security, and cloud security, and augmented by threat hunting and remediation services by subject matter security experts. Attackers have refined their methods so much that this range is necessary to stay secure,” said Raja Patel, senior vice president of products at Sophos. “The fact that IT and security professionals recognize Sophos as the Leader across these key categories is validation that Sophos delivers the best and most comprehensive set of products and services required for modern day cybersecurity.”

Google removes 5 million file creation cap for Drive after backlash

I didn't report on when they implamented because I was curious as to what the impact was going to be. 

First, who is storing that many files to Google Drive? That number is pretty crazy. But on April 4th we see that Google is changing its mind and is rolling this limit back. They stated that the limits were put in place "to preserve stability and optimize performance". That actually made sense to me. I can't imagine the impact of that many files on their system.

I don't disagree with their intent but their lack of communication about the inital implementation wasn't done very well. Hopefully when they approach this again with whatever new approach they are going to use they will do so with a little more information in advance.

Tablet Afterthoughts

I will be returning periodically to review this adventure I have embraced with the new E- Ink technology of my Boox Note Air 2 Plus tablet.

I am finding ways to make myself more efficient. The last 6 weeks I am totally off my MS Surfacebook for meetings. This tablet is providing 99 % of what I need to document and access what I need to make more productive during the meetings and I am hauling around a lot less equipment.

Now I have spent some time to really think about how I can make myself more efficient. One of those steps was to move back to one of my favorite APPS, One Note.

For our weekly meetings, this allows to create agenda to follow and quickly share that info our big screens and have people add to the documentation of the meeting live that we can all add to. As everyone gets more involved this will only get better. It shows what has made impression what need to follow up .

One of the new things that I doing is to add back some of the other meeting notes that I am taking. with vendors so that I can share them with others well put them in context with

what I am doing on a daily basis.

The capture and sharing of this information is an important part of business week.

Capturing and sharing of data is hard to accomplish effectively.

By the way, this article was completely written on my Boox Air Note 2 Plus.

More Articles on the 3CX Compromise

CSO has a good report and responsible things to do to keep yourself safe.It is worth a read.

Computer Weekly also had an article you can read here.

An updated report from Sophios can be found here. Sophos is one of the first security companies finding, protecting. and reporting on this problem. They are again proving to be on the front edge of the security business.

3CX Desktop Attack: Sophos Customer Information

Here is a good article from Sophos that describes what is going on.

3CX CEO Nick Galea is urging users to uninstall the affected software, which includes versions 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 of the Windows app. The company is working on an update to fully resolve the threat. In the meantime, 3CX says users can use its web-based app as a substitute.

I have moved back to an earlier version of the app in the meantime but we have heard that another update should be available shortly to take care of this issue.

Welcome to the new era of Microsoft Teams! | S7 E7

Microsoft YouTube video to discuss the next chapter of the Microsoft Teams story, with the public preview of the new Microsoft Teams app for Windows. In this episode, Derek Snyder speaks with Jeff Teper, President of Collaborative Apps & Platforms about what this means for the future.

Sign up for Adobe’s Firefly AI Image Generator

If you want to get into the trial for Adobe's Firefly AI image generator you will need to request access to the program. In jumping to this site you will need to fill out your information as well as how you think you're going to use the application. There is no cost involved in doing this. Videos that were shown on the site on using the application are very exciting and I can't wait to have access to Adobe Firefly product.

Two of the features that they are showing are text to image and text effects and they have videos that will demonstrate the use of them. This is not a finished product but a trial of a product in beta testing so they're going to ask you for some feedback. It does appear that you will have some Photoshop type capabilities. It looks like a lot of fun!

Last week's announcement of Sophos and Cowbell Partnership

Sophos has partnered with Cowbell Cyber Inc. to provide businesses with an easier way to access cyber insurance. The partnership will allow our clients to directly share their security health information with Cowbell to facilitate optimal premium quotes and policies and gain access to Cowbell insurance through Sophos.

The partnership is a further step in Sophos’ journey to support its customers in the efforts to mitigate cyber risk. Specifically, Sophos endpoint customers will be able to ‘opt-in’ to share with Cowbell their endpoint security health status from the Sophos Central platform, using a secure API. The partnership will also allow Cowbell to offer its cyber insurance coverage to Sophos customers in the U.S. through the opt-in sharing of endpoint health security data.

The benefits of the partnership include easier access to cyber insurance for businesses, optimal premium quotes and policies, and the ability to share endpoint security health status with Cowbell to facilitate optimal premium quotes and policies.

Do we really need ChatGPT?

The majority of my posts this week appear to be about ChatGPT and the excitement of what this type of program addition is going to do for us, the other shoe has to drop and have us take a long look at what  the entrance of this type of applications will do to our crativity and capabilities. Nicholas Sutrich wrote an article from this viewpoint that you may want to read called:ChatGPT is everywhere these days, but do we really need it?

He makes the argument on a result of embracing this technology can't ultimately dumb us down and actually have a negative result rather than being a tool that can free you up to make you more efficient and be able to process more data in a shorter time. Hmm! I wonder what direction we will take?

SharePoint Online Gets Closer to Azure AD

We are continuing to see a trend with quite a few of our clients to replace their on site servers and moving to the cloud to share their files with others in their organizations. With the increased security being placed on this practice we are much safer than before for outside risks.

I have recently run across an article from office365itpros.com that discusses the closer integration of Azure AD B2B and SharePoint Services. It describes the need to review your Azure B2B Invitation Manager policies. This is the list that describes the allow and denial of access of domains. This is worth a quick look. I have included a quick list from their site that includes what this article contains.

Table of Contents

• ·         Azure AD B2B Collaboration and Guest Accounts for SharePoint Sharing
• ·         Rationalization Around Azure AD
• ·         Time to Review Applicable Policies
• ·         Review Guest Accounts Too

What is B2B in Azure AD? - B2B collaboration is a capability of Azure AD External Identities that lets you collaborate with users and partners outside of your organization. With B2B collaboration, an external user is invited to sign into your Azure AD organization using their own credentials.

What are the benefits of Azure B2B? - Azure AD B2B can also benefit your organization in other ways.

• ·         It's easy to invite guests and internal users quickly. ...
• ·         Guest users/collaborators can self-serve. ...
• ·         Use policies to securely share your apps and services. ...
• ·         Application and group owners can manage their own guest users. ...
• ·         Integrate with SharePoint and OneDrive.

Sophos Demonstrates How to Make ChatGPT a Cybersecurity Co-Pilot

I've already talked about Microsoft's new copilot applications and now they're working with their desktop apps, here's an article- press release from Sophos discussing GPT-3 which is the language model behind ChatGPT in how it might be an integral part of deciphering malicious activity found in their data lake. this isn't quite there yet, but this may be an integral part of being able to quickly and more precisely determine if an attack has happened and then help with the possible mitigation of the event. It's worth a quick read if you are interested in this subject.

As a hoot, let’s generate an article from Bing Chat!

In playing around with the Bing Chat program I wanted to see just what it could do. I created a request as follows: 

Bing Chat responded with parsing the request:

And the result:

Cute!

So, you want to get out ahead of this ChatGPT craze?

In this industry, we always seem to be in a learning mode. Here is another instance of new technology getting a lot of focus and me sitting here thinking about whether I want to go ahead and get on board and start learning more about it or waiting to see if it really is going to be as big as it seems that it will be based on the amount of chatter around the product.

I came across an article this morning with the title: 10 of the best ChatGPT courses you can take for free this week that provides some links to free courses that you can take. The links provide access to all video content and will at least get you started in the right direction. Good Luck!

YouTubeTV Price Increase

Having made the leap to cutting the cord a couple of years ago, I still don't regret the move.

We have seen price increases across the board now with most of the services, so it seems like a great time to reevaluate all the services that we are using, and maybe, not using.

I have acquired quite a few online digital services for my online entertainment content. I listen to quite a few audio books and I was quite lucky to be able to take advantage of my early membership with Audible to have latch on to the 5 credit per month at the 2 credit price. They don't even offer more than 2 credits anymore! This kind of membership allows me to quickly take on a new author's book series and consume it. This is not even on the table.

We also have the Kindle Unlimited service. This is probably one that we could dial back on but my wife is starting to better understand that service. So it is another one that for now we will keep but watch if it continues to be something we take advantage of.

Now back to what originally started this article! YouTubeTV. It is my core TV service so it has to stay in as well as the 4K option. With the increase in the primary and the decrease in the 4k I still have a net $2.00's savings. This is a no brainer. However, we have Hallmark Movies and I think this is going to go. my wife just like gave me confirmation. This service will be terminated. Sorry Hallmark!

Amazon Prime has to be a keeper as well. It has a couple of series that I enjoy and the other benefits of service makes it a service to keep as well.

Hulu is a strange one that we don't visit much. With YouTubeTV giving us the opportunity to record anything with unlimited storage, why would we? That is another expense that I’m having a hard time justifying.

Netflix we use a lot for comedy specials and of course movie's so I am pretty much stuck there.

Peacock is another example where special content makes you come back.

Acorn has become our go to service for our favorite TV series to watch. We just love British shows and believe it or not, this is the least expensive of all of the services. I have to keep this one, too.

Add them all up and I really still feel that we are getting good value for our money compared to what cable offers. l am still quite happy with our decision to cut cable television from our lives.

How about you?

Note: Hallmark Movies gone! Hulu is still making the cut!

A more complete look at the Microsoft Office 365 Copilot product

Microsoft 365 Copilot

The big release yesterday from microsoft was a series of videos showing a future release product called Microsoft 365 Copilot. A series of videos showing how this new AI application can help you in many of the Microsoft O365 Apps to automate the creation of documentation products from previous examples of work, documents, messages and more. The automation being presented is smooth and slick but how well is it really going to do the job for you? 

I have included a video of the it being used in a Word Document creation scenerio for you to view. Looks neat if it will really do what they are showing.

New Waze Configuration Feature

Wow, this seemed to be the big news item yesterday! For those of you driving EV cars the new Waze feature allows the app to be configured with your car model. Why is that important? With this new piece of information you will now be shown EV stations that have your car's correct EV Connector at the EV filling station. Google states that their local map editors will keep the database up to date with the correct EV connector information.

From PortableApps.com: Notepad++ Portable 8.5 (developer's text editor) Released

A new version of Notepad++ Portable has been released. It's the handy Notepad++ text editor packaged as a portable app so you can do your development on the go. It has all the same great features of Notepad++ including support for multiple languages and an extensive plugin system, but there's nothing to install. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Platform. And it's open source and completely free.

Happy Pi Day!

Pi (often represented by the lower-case Greek letter π), one of the most well-known mathematical constants, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  For any circle, the distance around the edge is a little more than three times the distance across.

Typing π into a calculator and pressing ENTER will yield the result 3.141592654, not because this value is exact, but because a calculator’s display is often limited to 10 digits.  Pi is an irrational number (a decimal with no end and no repeating pattern) that is most often approximated with the decimal 3.14 or the fraction 22/7.

How are you going to celebrate this special day? I think I need to read a book that I have never read called Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi

Teams Adds Explicit Consent for Recorded Meetings

In January, Microsoft released a post talking about the road map for Microsoft Teams to include explicit recording consent for Teams meetings. This appears to be a policy that needs to be applied.

The Teams’ meeting window will then request an explicit consent of all participants to be recorded. Before a user gives consent the user’s audio, video and screenshare/consent- share won't be captured in the meeting recording.

The new feature is a computer-enforced version with some added intelligence. This will help to provide a more consistent experience for your company’s meetings.

This can’t be done through the Teams admin center today, so you’ll need to update Teams meeting policies with PowerShell. The policy setting is per-user and applies to the meeting organizer. After the setting is enabled in a meeting policy, any meeting organized by accounts assigned to the policy will use explicit consent for recorded meetings.

For more information on how to do this take a look at this article by Tony Redmond of Office 365 IT Pros.