44. How Will Tariffs Impact Cybersecurity Risks?

How will tariffs impact cybersecurity? As costs rise, we will be forced to make difficult decisions. Many will choose not to upgrade old technology which gives the bad guys a huge advantage. Here's what to do about it.

Episode Transcript

Justin (00:15):
Welcome, everybody, to episode 44 of Unhacked. I am
Justin Shelley, CEO of PhoenixIT Advisors. I do, listen. I I
protect businesses from theRussian hackers, from the damp
government. We're gonna deepdive on that one today.
And the attorneys that wannacome around and sue us if we get
breached, that's what I do. I dowork in the Dallas area,

(00:37):
Northern Nevada, and Utah. AndI'm here with my faithful and
loyal cohost, my ride or die,Mario. Mario, say hi. Tell
people what you do and who youdo it for.

Mario (00:48):
How's everybody doing? My name is Mario Zacke, CEO of
Mastech IT located in New Jerseyright outside of New York. And
we protect small to medium sizedbusinesses and their owners from
cyber attacks and keeping themsafe on the the web.

Justin (01:09):
Alright. Mario, we're we're a little short handed
today. We usually historic Imean, we've recently we've had
three and even four people onand today it's just the two of
us. So we're gonna have to bringour A game to try to make this a
little bit interesting,exciting, informative. And we're
gonna talk about something thathas my attention.
I'll be honest Mario, I get upin the morning and I scroll,

(01:33):
don't judge me, I scroll socialmedia and mostly what I see on
there is doom and gloom. LikeJesus Christ, what is going on
in the world? Everybody's pissedoff at everybody. People love
Trump, they hate Trump, there'slike no middle ground and I just
usually want to go back to bedand say I'll come back out, I'll

(01:53):
poke my little head out when theworld's done burning down and
just kind of see how this alllands but unfortunately that's
not an option to live under arock. So here we are and today
we are going to break down thesetariffs, the tariff wars and
here's what I'm not going to dotoday Mario, you can do as you
please but I am not going totake a position on any political

(02:16):
subject whatsoever.
I want to talk about what arethese tariffs, this change in
the landscape, the tradelandscape, the economic
landscape, what is that doing tobusiness and in particular, what
is it doing to cyber securityand what do we need to be aware
of and potentially afraid of.With that Mario, I'm gonna punt

(02:38):
this to you. What are yourthoughts? Just let's just kinda
spitball here. What are yourthoughts on all these tariffs?

Mario (02:44):
Well, I mean, it's getting messy. And the problem
is people don't know what'sgonna happen next. Right? You
know, he's Yeah. He's putting atariff on Canada, putting a
tariff on Mexico, and putting aa tariff on China.
Well, and guess what? You know,a lot of our stuff that we're

(03:05):
getting in, look at the bottomof the label. Most of it says
made in China, you know, andespecially the tech stuff, you
know, the chips Right. Keyboard,you know, all that stuff. That's
that's what's getting scary.
And even though it's only a 10%tariff, we're pissing them off.

(03:25):
You know, like

Justin (03:26):
I I listen. I I said I don't I'm not gonna say much and
honestly, it's because I don't Idon't follow this that closely.
Yeah. But I saw a number thatsaid something like 60%. So I
don't know what it is.
I know it's significant enoughthat it's pissing a lot of
people off like you said. It'sgoing to drive up the prices

(03:46):
right, so let's kind of diveinto that. Number one this is
really shitty timing becauseMario what happens towards the
end of this year that's going toimpact almost every business in
the world?

Mario (03:58):
It is the end of life of Windows 10.

Justin (04:02):
Windows ten's been a good solid operating system. It
has. I have recently upgraded toWindows 11 but I will tell you I
had no need to, I wasn'tinterested, I didn't want to
make the change. So there's nosense of urgency other than the
security ramifications. Right?
And so talk about that for asecond. What if I don't upgrade

(04:22):
to Windows 11, I stay on Windows10, why is that a problem if it
does everything I need it to do?

Mario (04:28):
Well, because I believe it's October 31 or October 25,
something like that, theOctober, Microsoft is no longer
going to be supporting it. Sothey're not going to release any
security patches, any updates,anything for It they're gonna
treat it just like the way theytreated Windows seven, Windows

(04:51):
eight, Windows XP. So in the ITworld, we have to treat it the
same way. Like, you you walkinto an environment, and if you
see a Windows 10 after October,we're like, alright. This is a
security breach.
This is no longer allowed.

Justin (05:09):
And Just the existence of it is

Mario (05:11):
a security breach. Right? Exactly. And what's gonna end up
happening is, you know, shortlyafter that, the security
companies that we work with,the, you know, the the the
antiviruses and the, you know,stuff like that, they're going
to no longer support updates forthat as well. So, you know, it's
it's you know, for people thatare familiar, like, imagine

(05:33):
walking to a place and seeing acomputer that's Windows XP or
Windows seven.
It it, you know, it's

Justin (05:39):
We're ahead

Mario (05:39):
of there. Security. Yeah.

Justin (05:41):
Now there's and so there's there's a good and bad
to this mandated upgrade. Like,it has to happen if you're
regulated at all. HIPAA forexample, you have to have
Windows 11, you can't have outof date unsupported operating
systems. The good news is it's afree software upgrade. The bad
news is terms and conditionsapply.

(06:02):
Yes. Let's talk about thoseterms and conditions. What what
would prevent somebody fromtaking the free upgrade?

Mario (06:08):
So with the so when people went to, like, from
Windows XP to Windows seven orfrom seven to eight, eight to
10, you know, a lot of times itwas also free. And as long as
you're able to install it andrun it, no problem, everything
was fine. Now there's somesecurity things that go along

(06:31):
with this upgrade that areprerequisite, rec requirements
for you to install Windows 11.So the three major ones are has
to be a recent processor, likean Intel processor. So it has to
be, like, eighth or ninthgeneration or higher.
It has to have a TPM chip in it,and we're gonna be talking about

(06:55):
chips in a minute. This chippretty much lets you put in the
bit bit what is it? Not theBitdefender. What's the
encryption? The Windowsencryption.
Why am I drawing a blank here?

Justin (07:11):
Oh, now you said BitLocker, so that's where I'm
at BitLocker. BitLocker. It'sbecause there's another name
that's too damn close to itguys. BitLocker. Better naming

Mario (07:20):
Exactly, so BitLocker which lets you securely, you
know, encrypt your hard drive incase it gets stolen or something
like that. And the third thingthat, that I'm aware of is it
needs to have an SSD hard drive.Alright? Most computers probably
right now have an SSD harddrive, but the TPM link and the

(07:42):
processor are big ones becauseyou so for example, a computer
that is, like, seven years old,it will not take Windows

Justin (07:53):
11. Right. So it's a free upgrade and the conditions
are you have to have prettyrecent hardware to make it all
work. Right? And here's thething, I don't know about you,
don't know what you see whenyou're out there in the wild, I
don't see generally speaking alot of businesses being

(08:15):
proactive on keeping theirhardware up to date.
Do you see that? Is it just me,Mario, or my clients and
prospects just cheapskates?

Mario (08:24):
You know what it is? It's a lot of people now are going
with the whole mindset of ifit's not broken, don't fix it.

Justin (08:34):
Yeah. Cause honestly for a while in the world of
technology, we had two things,we had excitement, right?
Because things were gettingbetter and better and they could
do more and more. Right now,computers pretty much do
everything we need them to do. Imean, there's a few exceptions
to that, but generally speaking,I'm not sitting here waiting for
the next processor update sothat I can do more stuff.
I'm doing everything I need todo. That's the number one, we

(08:55):
don't have that excitement thatwe used to have around it and
number two, prices used to drop.It used to be that when I got my
new computer it was cheaper thanthe one I got before and better
and now that's not true at all.You out to buy a new computer
and it's up ten, twenty, 30percent from the last time you
bought one. I mean it's just awhole different world we're

(09:16):
living in.
That's the situation, Windows 10is ending. This was gonna become
an immediate violation ofregulations in some cases and
best case scenario, it's a riskto your business. That's the
best case scenario is it's onlya risk. Worst case is

Mario (09:39):
you

Justin (09:39):
can get fined or whatever sued. Like, don't wanna
get into that too much, but it'strue. It's real.

Mario (09:47):
You know, the one thing too, and I I was talking to
somebody about this, what'shappening is when when Windows,
10 is no longer supported,shortly after that, like I said
earlier, Microsoft is notreleasing any updates for. If
you I I do remember, afterWindows seven was no longer

(10:08):
supported. A few months afterthat, there was a huge problem
where there was, like, a zeroday attack that was discovered
that some hackers knew about itbefore Windows stopped
supporting it. So sometimes whatthey're doing is hackers know of
something, but they're waitinguntil Microsoft is out of the

(10:29):
picture. Right.
So come, say, December of twentytwenty five, there could be a
security breach, and Microsoftis gonna tell you, well, we told
you to switch, we're not doinganything about it.

Justin (10:41):
Right. Now there's another little bit of fine
print. Like, usually Microsoftwill offer paid support for
unsupported operating systemsand this is because some
software and some hardware won'trun on newer operating systems.
You've got legacy stuff outthere that just you can't
upgrade it which is reallyfrustrating. So I guess you know

(11:02):
worst case you can maybe weighthat risk but no matter what you
have an out of date operatingsystem, have an out of date
hardware and the securitypatches become less and less
effective even though you knoweven if you do pay for them and
try to extend it.
So this poses a problem back totariffs we've got a case where
already demand is going to go upand now we're going to the

(11:25):
perfect storm of supply goingdown at the same time we can't
get the chips manufactured or atleast we can't do it for the
same price, we can still bringthem over from China, right, but
they're 10 times as much,because that becomes
exponential, it's not just thepercentage of the tariff, then
you've got everybody's cut as apercentage on top of that. Let's

(11:47):
just say it's 10% but everysales rep everywhere in the
chain gets his commission as apercentage. Every business owner
or every industry, they taketheir cut as a percentage and so
that 10% can become a %. Meanit's just I'm not trying to be
specific with the numbers but Iam saying that this is an effect

(12:08):
it's like a snowball effect thatwe're gonna not see a small
percentage increase it's gonnabe a fairly dramatic increase
probably according to thecrystal balls that I'm looking
at. And not only is the pricegonna go up, supply is gonna go
down at the same time, it's justgonna be harder to get this
stuff.
Like somebody could come in andsay hey Mario, need 100 PCs and
I need them by October 14 and bythe way, today's October 12.

(12:30):
Well guess what, SOL, it's nothappening.

Mario (12:33):
Exactly.

Justin (12:34):
Okay, so let's about, let's move out of the world of
PCs and workstations. And I meanby the way, Apple, you're not
immune from this. Apple people,they're like a cult of their
own, they love to think they'reexempt from I love my Apple
people, I live with them.Anyways, and they'll be
listening later. So beyond theworkstations, beyond the, you

(12:59):
know, I mean, while I'm talkingabout Apple iPhones, The phones
and this is going be anotherissue there.
But what other problem does thispose as far as, technology goes?

Mario (13:12):
So, I mean, it it's the the chips itself, you know, that
that not only go inside thecomputers, but other stuff as
well, like hardware, and, sorry,sorry, like firewalls and stuff
like that. Okay. And and thechips that I mentioned earlier,
the TPM link, you know, there alot of the stuff that we are
getting from, especially China,is going to be subject to a lot

(13:36):
of this stuff. You know? Even,appliances and stuff like that
is gonna start getting a littlemore expensive.

Justin (13:43):
Yeah, mean you mentioned firewalls, let's talk about that
for a second. Is an interestingsubject actually because it used
to be, security used to be sosimple, You just put a firewall
in place and you put anantivirus on your workstations,
that was it. Now we've got somuch work from home and we've
got smaller offices, one to fiveuser companies. A lot of times

(14:09):
they don't have a good firewallto begin with, they're just
using what the ISP puts intoplace which is not recommended.
So there's already resistance togetting the adequate, the
correct equipment in place tosecure a network.
But now we've got, once again,we're gonna have higher cost,

(14:30):
lower supply and that resistanceis gonna go up. Mario, if I'm a
bad guy, I'm sitting around witha bag of popcorn watching this
shit show with a great big grinon my face.

Mario (14:44):
Yeah. Yeah. Because people are going to start you
know, because the reason we haveit even though that we're a lot
of the stuff that we're gettingfrom China is because it's so
much cheaper to get it from overthere than do it here. Right?
And when the whole reason, youknow, behind these Trump tariffs
is that he brings more jobs andmore manufacturing back in the

(15:06):
country.
K? Well, the reason it wasoutsourced is because it's
cheaper. So we're gonna in youknow, bring it in here, and now
it's gonna be a lot moreexpensive, you know, to to pay
somebody even if it's minimumwage. Here, it's probably 10
times more than paying somebodyoverseas. So people are gonna
say, well, you know what?
I am not you know, when when Ibought a new firewall four years

(15:28):
ago, it was x amount of dollars.Now it's three times that price.
I'm not doing that. I'm stickingwith my old one even though
you're saying it's no longergonna be updating or I'm just
gonna go to Best Buy and justgrab a Linksys off the shelf.

Justin (15:45):
Yeah. You know? And and, again, bad guys are sitting here
with a bag of popcorn justthinking, yeah.

Mario (15:51):
Yeah. Like go ahead, go get

Justin (15:53):
that Let's do that. Let's do that. And you know and
and you talk about the thatit'll be higher prices to build
this stuff here in The States.That's the end game. That's true
once all the dust settles.
The big problem we have in theinterim is it's gonna take us a

(16:14):
while to get there. Let's justsay everything works out And in
the end, it stabilizes andstuff's a little bit more
expensive because it'smanufactured here. How long does
it take to ramp up to get there?

Mario (16:25):
I mean, they they have to, you know, build a facility,
they have to get the machines,they have to train people, they
may have to do some trial anderror testing and all that
stuff. I mean, we're talkingyears.

Justin (16:41):
Yeah, right, right. So in this gap here's what I fear
is going to happen, let's sayand I'll pick on my vendor, use,
actually I won't use names, Iuse XYZ brand of firewall, I've
standardized on it. And let'sjust say that these prices go
up, well it'll be nice and justsay they go up 30%. And I go to
my clients and I'm like hey thatthousand dollar firewall you

(17:03):
bought last year, five years agowhatever, with inflation with
everything else now we'relooking at $1,500. 13 hundred
whatever.
So you know what happens a lotof times and maybe again maybe
I'm the only one, I'll get anemail back that says, hey wait I
found this exact same thing onAmazon, is it okay to buy that?

(17:23):
Okay well if it was the exactsame thing, yes, the answer is
yes. The problem is we get a lotof counterfeit equipment. Now
here's something I learned awhile back, just for Black
Friday sales, have you heardthat manufacturers will build
specific equipment for BlackFriday sales? That is not the

(17:45):
same.
So you think you're getting adeal, a discount, what you're
getting is cheaper shit and sowe're run into that as well
where not just cheaper butactual counterfeit. They take
the box of XYZ firewall, gut it,put their own stuff in there,
slap a new sticker on it andthis is hypothetical, I'm just

(18:07):
saying these are the potentialthings that I'm a little bit
concerned about right now.

Mario (18:13):
Yes. I mean, there's definitely going to be, you
know, things that, you know,people are gonna try to make up,
you know, make up somewhereelse, you know, and, you know,
it it could be either becausethey're they wanna save money or
because they can't get the thethe product that they need or
because it just there's too manyhoops to run through to get it.

(18:37):
You know, I'll like, thefirewalls that we use, you know,
with the exception of, you know,some of them you can get on
Amazon or eBay, you know, thethe basic customer is not gonna
be able to go and just say, Iwant one of these. You know?
They they only work with, like,certain channels and and IT
providers, you know, so, there'sgonna be a lot of hoops and it's

(19:01):
going it's gonna even make itharder for us to get some of the
stuff as well.

Justin (19:04):
Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's so let's pivot a little
bit and we'll we'll puthardware, we'll put a pin on
that for a minute and let's talkabout war, let's talk about
cyber war Mario because like Isaid I wake up and all I see is
rage, I see it between people inour own country, I see it

(19:24):
between people in our countryversus Canada, Us versus Mexico,
Canada versus Canada, you've gotCanadians on there bad mouthing
Canada, you've got Canadians badmouthing America, you've got
America bad, this absolute, it'sjust rage, like over and over
the best thing, one of myfavorite things to do is to take
a headline, newsworthy topic andI just like to go and read the

(19:49):
comments and I live in thatdumpster fire world see how
people are handling it and youcan just kind of get a feel for
where people are at emotionallythis way. In good times it's
nice, there's only a little bitof nonsense in these comments
but right now it's just straightup hate there's no middle ground

(20:11):
for it and that's amongst us.
Now we're gonna expand that tothe hate that's going on, we've
already got countries that hateus and that are attacking us.
What what are your thoughtshere? Are are we at risk of a
cyber war?

Mario (20:30):
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I I think, you know, like, for
example, you know, talking aboutChina, like, you know, they're
going to, you know, it's notjust a tariff war. You know,
they're they're, you know, we'reputting a tariff on their stuff.
They're putting a tariff on ourstuff. They're gonna stop, you
know, providing us with certainthings altogether even if we're

(20:52):
like, alright.
Forget it. We're not evenselling you this stuff. And then
on top of that, you know, someof these countries and we've
mentioned in previous podcasts,some of these countries, like,
the the cyber attacks thatthey're doing, it's allowed.
You're allowed to to do some ofthe, you know, like, attack, you
know, as long as you're notattacking, you know, within the

(21:13):
country, you're attackingoutside of the country, you're
protected. Right.
You know? So this is going tostart ramping up, you know,
because it may come down fromthe higher above of there. Like,
you know what? Let let's ramp itup. We will, you know I don't
know.
They may they may give out,like, tax exemptions or

(21:34):
something. I don't know whatthey do over there, but they're
going to get the green light topick up pick up the notch. You
know? I mean, you you saw whatthey you know, what happened or
you've heard about, like, whathappened with, you know, x,
which is formerly Twitter. Youknow, they they were under
attack hard.

Justin (21:55):
Yeah. I I mean, tell us a little bit about that. So it's
a denial of service, adistributed denial of service,
DDoS attack. What does thatmean? Tell tell our audience a
little bit about what thatmeans.
So

Mario (22:07):
it pretty much what it is is a hacker or or an
organization will gathernetworks or computers. Like,
they'll create an army ofcomputers, and it's not just
coming from one place. It willbe coming from multiple places,
different countries, all aroundthe world.

Justin (22:26):
And verify these are computers that they have
breached. Correct? They'vethey've gotten some version of
malware on there where they nowcan use that computing power
unknown to the actual owner.Right? Yeah.
So they got this network ofthese, and then what do they do?

Mario (22:43):
Yeah. And yeah. It's exactly like what you just said,
Justin. It's not just like,their computers, and we're not
talking about, like, a dozenhere in China, you know, in The
United States and a dozen inChina. We're talking about
thousands of systems throughoutthe world from different IP
addresses.
They all form like this thisarmy, and they try to attack one

(23:05):
specific website or, you know,group. And in this situation, it
was x.com. And what they'redoing is they're sending it a
bunch of commands all at onetime, and the website or the,
you know, the server can'thandle all that at one time.
It's not built for an, you know,an excess of these commands all

(23:29):
at once. Right.
You know, put it this way. Youknow, you ever go to, like,
Ticketmaster when there's a new,you know, let's just call it
WrestleMania

Justin (23:38):
Good example.

Mario (23:39):
Coming out. You know? Yep. And you go to the store or
actually even better Apple.comwhen the new Apple's coming out
and they want you to go andpreorder, and it says it's gonna
be open up mid diet on this day.What ends up happening?
All these thousands of peopleare going to that website all at
once trying to preorder, and thewebsite either freezes, crashes,

(24:01):
or it goes, you know, nobody cancan even access their account.

Justin (24:05):
Or the Mike Tyson fight on Netflix, did you try to watch
that?

Mario (24:07):
Yeah, exactly.

Justin (24:08):
I mean, just glitchy bad resolution, it was terrible
experience. So, yeah, you'reexactly right. This is an
intentional overload of a serverand in this case it was x.com.
They intentionally overloaded itthrough this network of bad guy
owned and operated network ofstolen computing power and the

(24:32):
distributed part of this, whatmakes these so hard to prevent
against is that it comes fromlegitimate computers as far as
the server can tell so it'sreally hard to say. If I just
took my computer and sprayed anattack all over x.com they could
say fuck that Justin Shelley guyand they blocked me right and
then I'm done.
This is coming from all kinds ofcomputers all over the world so

(24:54):
very difficult to defend againsta DDoS attack. Yeah.

Mario (25:00):
In most situations, the like the IT, you know, people
department that that's handlingthat, they there's nothing that
they can do about it. So allthey all they can do is shut
down. Like, alright. We we can'tdo anything about so we shut
down. And, you know, in a way,they the the bad guys have won
because they took down I mean,they took down yeah.

Justin (25:22):
That that's their goal. They're just trying to hurt
people. So, we're there there'sa good chance we'll see more of
that. And and, you know, X.com,we can argue that that's not
super important but theseattacks start happening on our
power grid, they start happeningto financial institutions,
education institutions,healthcare institutions and now
we have real world life anddeath scenarios. So it is

(25:45):
definitely something that we'vegot to keep our eyes open for,
be aware of and now what I wantto do is kind of bring this home
with now what?
We just laid out all theproblems, what can we do about
it? What are your thoughts thereAmaya? Because just to sit here
and be afraid, I shit you not, Iget up every morning and my

(26:06):
blood pressure goes up. That'snot a good strategy in life, so
what do we do to mitigate theserisks and maybe prepare for the
inevitable? How we make lifejust a little bit more
manageable while we go throughthis?

Mario (26:22):
Well, I mean, it it it's you know, we always say the
first step, you know, is isawareness. You know, you have to
learn and train your employees,you know, for the right things
that they need to do. You know,if you if your employees are
properly educated, you're about90% there. Right? Because the

(26:43):
you know you know they're gonnaramp up, you know, the the
attacks.
You know they're gonna ramp upthese malicious links and
malicious websites and stufflike that. You know, they they
they have to proceed withcaution, be on high alert.
That's step one.

Justin (26:58):
Yeah. No, I agree completely. Most of what we talk
about on Unhacked is thetechnology side of this and what
we need to do from a technologystandpoint to protect against
attacks. But what is oftenoverlooked is culture, it's the
human aspect of this and likeyou said, we've got to be aware

(27:18):
of it, we've to be training forit and then I don't know if you
sell cyber security awarenesstraining or if you try to
promote that to your end usersit's very hard to get adoption.
People have enough to do it sowe can't just email a link to
people and say here take thistraining and think we're done.

(27:38):
That is not cyber securityawareness training, that is
spam. So what we really have todo is create a culture around
awareness. Like guys this iswhat's going on in the world,
let's talk about it. Let's talkabout what we need to be
watching for as a team, as acompany and then we reward good

(27:59):
behavior and we punish badbehavior and that bad behavior
by the way is not participating.Okay I gave you a link and we
did talk about and we've offeredincentives and you're still not
doing it I'm sorry but you'vegot to go.
You can't work here if you'regoing to be the reason we get
breached. Like we have to getvery serious about cyber
security in our organizations.This can't be an afterthought.

Mario (28:21):
And that one person can be can you know in a in a big
situate or in in a most possiblescenario is he can be the reason
that takes down the entirenetwork. And guess what? Now
everybody's out of work becausenow worst case scenario, company
has to close down. So eveeverybody that has that company

(28:42):
as their lihood and may havefamily can be all taken down by
that one person that justrefuses on on cooperating and
listening to what they're told.

Justin (28:51):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Mario (28:53):
You know, I I have a a good example of this. So we we
recently changed ourcybersecurity awareness company
that we we work with, and weswitched over to a system that I
think is a little more advanced.And we launched it, and we had a
couple companies right awaycall, you know, open up a bunch

(29:15):
of tickets and, like, hey. Wejust got this

Justin (29:17):
We got spam.

Mario (29:18):
Email, you know, that it looks like it's coming from our
IT department, and it's askingus to reset our password. Nobody
has clicked anything, but shouldwe do this? You know? And guess
what? You know?
We told them, like, you knowwhat? That was a test.

Justin (29:33):
Good job.

Mario (29:34):
You guy you you guys, you know, you passed the test. You
brought it to us because youdidn't just click and say, okay.
Those damn guys, they need me tochange my password. You you
brought it up to your higherhigher ups. The higher up
reached out to us to say, hey.
All my guys are getting thisemail. What what do we do? I'm
like, did they click on it? No.No.

(29:54):
Nobody clicked on it. I'm like,then award them because they
passed the test.

Justin (29:57):
No kidding. Yeah.

Mario (29:59):
Yeah. You know? So that's that's the type of culture that,
you know, these business ownersneed to put into place. It's
like, hey. You know?
It's like that saying, seesomething, say something. You
that's exactly what they need todo.

Justin (30:12):
I agree, I agree completely and Mario we're gonna
go ahead and wrap this up,you're further illustrating my
point, culture is absolutelycritical and it sounds like
you're doing that, that's notjust a stamp of approval on your
client for bringing that to youbut kudos to you as an MSP for

(30:33):
creating that awareness and justletting them know what they
should do in those cases. Sothat says a lot about who you
are as an MSP as well so I don'tknow if I had a trophy, I would
give it to you. That said Mario,let's go ahead and we're gonna
wrap with key takeaways, like Isay if somebody just listened to
a few minutes at the very end ofthe podcast, what is the most

(30:56):
important thing you would wantthem to do to deal with this
tariff war that we're you knowthat's that's just freaking
havoc?

Mario (31:06):
I mean, try to get, you know, ahead of the curve as much
as possible. You know, don'twait until September, October,
and say, hey, Justin. You know,all those emails that you've
been sending me, okay. We'rewe're finally ready because it's
going to be hard to really domuch, you know, in in a couple
of months. You know, takeadvantage of things that you

(31:29):
have in place now, or at leasthave a plan.
You know, if you have to replacenine computers, then do three a
month or something like that.You don't have to do it all at
once, but you have to, you know,like Brian says, get better
every day, work towards that,you know, end goal, but don't
wait. If you don't have some ofthis play stuff in place now,

(31:53):
get another set of eyes. Havesomebody come in and say, hey.
You know, by the way, you know,all your computers are not going
to take Windows 11.
You're going to have to replaceevery single one of them. Or
better yet, all these arecapable, and we need to schedule
a time to just update them, youknow, which Right. We said is

(32:13):
free of charge.

Justin (32:14):
Okay, I love it. Yeah, for sure. I mean the plan ahead,
That's what I boiled that downto what you just said, plan
ahead, have a plan and it tiesinto what I would say, I've kind
of been preaching for a whilenow ever since we had Joseph
Brunsmann on here, the insuranceguy. Plan of action and
milestones which is a termstolen from the world of

(32:36):
regulations, the regulatoryframeworks like NIST and stuff
like that. But here's what Iwould say, things are going to
get more expensive, this is notgoing to be good financially in
the short term, so we are goingto have to make decisions and I
don't want to use the termcutting corners, but I'm going
to.

(32:56):
Like if you have to cut corners,if you can't do x y z, you can't
replace your firewall this year,you can't replace all of your
windows 10 workstations, like dothat, PS, don't take this as
permission to not do it. But I'mtelling you if you simply can't,
you simply don't have the budgetto put all this in place because
the costs are up and becauseyour business is down, then do

(33:17):
what you can and I'm reallygonna push cyber security
awareness training for everybodyand building a culture around
that. That is cheap, it takeseffort, but it doesn't take a
whole lot of money. And then thenext thing I would say is
measure, like know yourweaknesses, so have these
regular assessments internally,assess your vendors, know what
they're up to, spend some time,you know, making sure that

(33:41):
they're being secure and their,you know, their high
cybersecurity hygiene orcybersecurity posture is where
it should and then document it.Know where your weaknesses are
and build awareness around it,and then, like you said, put a
plan in place.
Right? Mhmm. Because that thatwe can do. As long as we have a
plan, we're working towards it.It's better than sitting here
with our head in the sand.

(34:02):
So that's kind of my keytakeaway. Mario, as always,
thank you for being here andkudos to you also for the topic.
This was you throwing this outthere and I really appreciate
that. No problem. Love havingyou on here And, I I miss our
other guests and other cohost,but, that's alright.

(34:22):
We'll have we'll have them backnext week. So alright, guys.
That's it for this week. Thankyou for being here, and we'll
see next time.