MSP Journey: Kyle Kenyon, The Pro Tech Guy (EP 914)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. You are here watching or listening to the Wednesday live show, brought to us by our good friends over at ThreatLocker, Zero Trust, Total Control, and we thank them for being the sponsor of our live stream. Tonight, coming up, I've got a friend of the program coming back, Kyle Kenyon, the Pro Tech Guy, will be joining us.

But first, I've got to address a little bit of news. So, a couple weeks ago, I had SonicWall on, and we talked all about their issues that they were having, and how SonicWall was diligently proving that the zero-day threat really wasn't their issue, that the threat had been mitigated months before, and as long as you did your updates and changed your passwords, all would be good. But of course, just a little while ago, there was another SonicWall incident, and I didn't really mention it at the time, but I've got to mention it because many of you know that, yes, I use SonicWall as my firewalls.

Was I affected by this? I don't know, but I wasn't relying on the backups. That was the issue here. So, here's what happened.

So, earlier, SonicWall confirmed a major breach involving its MySonicWall cloud backup service exposing firewall configuration files for all customers who use the feature. The incident has escalated into one of the most significant managed security issues of the year, with downstream exploitation currently underway. So, what happened, you ask? So, of course, with all breaches, a lot of them begin with a brute force intrusion into SonicWall's cloud configuration backup system.

This actually started back in September, and it was initially believed that only 5% or less of the firewall installed base was affected. But on October 8th, SonicWall revised this advisory, stating that all customers who backed up configurations to the cloud were impacted. So, the attacker had gained access to encrypted firewall backups, which contained credentials, routing tables, VPN configurations, and policies.

And although encryption was in place, expert warned that these files provide a blueprint for targeted network intrusions. So, there's a little bit more to this, but SonicWall's response was that it has hardened cloud security infrastructure. It partnered with Mandarin for forensics and begun direct notifications to all impacted customers.

They published a remediation knowledge base in the MySonicWall portal that detailed how to verify exposure, download the assessment tool, and implement credential resets. And a dedicated support channel has been established for impacted partners to coordinate mitigation efforts. So, yeah, I was affected just like everybody else because I was using those backups and just leaving up there in the cloud.

So, I went through and changed all the credentials and did all of that stuff. So, I don't know if I'm going to reach back out to SonicWall to talk more about this, but a lot of people are not happy with SonicWall right now. We shall see what happens over the next few weeks.

And, of course, Discord had a vendor breach. And I'm not going to talk about that, but it was quite interesting to see that they had a little situation. I just got on Discord this year, if you can believe it, because some of the peer groups, everybody wants to be on Discord.

So, I have been hesitantly on there. I have not looked deep into that one, but I will look in it soon and see if I've got to do any changes with that. But what a world we live in, right? All right, let's go ahead and bring in our guest for this evening.

As I mentioned, Kyle Kenyon, Pro Tech Guy, an IT consulting and computer services company based in Framington, Massachusetts, founded in 2005. Is that date correct? Yeah, that's correct. I probably wasn't doing it as serious as I am now, but it started out as a side thing in my work that I worked at Best Buy and Micro Center and Depot Repair Places and I was kind of doing this thing on the side.

But, yeah, that's a real start date. Yeah. So, when did you actually go full time? We've never talked that much about that.

No, I don't think we, no. It was, let's see, it's probably about 10 years ago. It started out in my house and then I literally got to a point where I signed a lease for an office and I had all the counters and everything ready to go.

And then that lease, it like fell through. So, I had all my countertops in my living room while I was waiting to find another place. Were you married at that time? Yeah, yeah, I still am.

It worked out, but it was, I mean, literally, I mean, think of two, you know, like five computer stations that you do repairs on, like in a living room that's probably 600 square feet, the whole area, living room and dining room. So, it was tight. No kids though.

No kids. Okay, that's good. So, when I started the business, it was just me and I actually had a one-bedroom apartment and in the bedroom, I had a cubbyhole that literally fit exactly a little 36-inch bench area.

And that was where the air conditioning, this is how bad it was in 1997, I had a wall-in AC unit in that place. So, the AC was right above the bench and I had just enough room to work that in my bedroom. And I did that for two and a half years until I moved to the other space and got more room.

And at that point, it was only a few months where I actually got to rent the apartment next to me. And since then, I had always had a separate space. I'm sorry.

You're not too far, you're super close to your home, right? Yeah, I've always, so I forgot to mention, so I always have to clarify. There were two years when we bought our house that we actually worked out of the house. We had a third bedroom, which was my office, and then a lot of my equipment was in the garage.

And then we found this space, which is less than 1,000 feet from the house. But I've always been really close. This is the furthest commute I've ever had.

And it's 1,000 feet. Yeah. The first office I had was literally the apartment next door.

And then we moved from there to a townhouse, and we had unit two. My office was in unit seven for about six months. Unit one opened up right next door, so we moved it from unit seven to unit one.

So it was always, yeah, very convenient. And at the townhouse, it was nice because there were bedrooms. So if we had guests come over and stuff, there was always a separate place where they could go and stay upstairs.

So the bedrooms were upstairs, so we had the office downstairs. The front bedroom was my office, and the back bedroom was for guests. Nice, nice. 

That's a good setup. Yeah. I definitely think, like, I'm sure you felt the same way.

It's like you're doing it in that moment, and you get this tiny space where the air conditioner sits. And it's like you look back on it like almost like how you ever did it, but you kind of take these steps. And I can go even back before my situation I just described, and it was, you know, but it's all these little steps to get to the point we are today.

And then it's like, I mean, I don't know how big your space is, but I can't imagine. I mean, I like having a little room. I'm a one-man show, but I like having the ability to have a network rack and set it up and do things like that and all the different things.

I was much more residential, like screen repairs, SSD swaps, all that stuff up until COVID times. And then I kind of switched over to a little, like, literally just business stuff. Yeah, I don't like telling people how much space I have.

Okay. It's 2,002 square feet. Oh, that's good. 

That's nice. So it's... And that's, you recently acquired more for the... Yeah. Yeah, when we first moved in here, we only had about, probably about 900 square feet.

And then we took over the rest of this side of the building. And that was because the landlord did not want to rent out that space to the tattoo parlor. And we didn't want them there.

So I bit the bullet. Yeah, I bit the bullet. And at the time, I was bringing in enough residual income that wasn't directly tied to the business to cover the cost of the extra space.

We're just a little below that now, but we're still covering. I mean, it's not a super stretch or anything like that. I just wanted... I didn't want the business to pay for this side, but it's paying a little bit for it.

Yeah. Let me ask you this question before we get too far along. So, of course, I went to do a little more research to see what we had talked about on previous shows.

You were last on last year, just before TechCon. So I will ask you about that. But before that, I want to ask, what's up with the website? It's down right now.

Right now, it's like a giant Canva business card, I think. Yes, yes. I did like a lot of Squarespace stuff before, you know, probably five, six years ago.

And, you know, I made a couple of websites and kind of faded out. And I just recently been into the more like... You've probably heard me talk about Raspberry Pis and all that stuff, the self-hosting world and all that stuff. So right now, I have a WordPress hosting thing.

It's a turnkey thing. I'm not managing all the hosting of that. I didn't want to go that in-depth, but working on something that's a little bit... My website was dated, you know, kind of, and I never really jumped over to like really flushing out all the stuff that I do for the business side, because it was much more residential focused.

And it's almost like, I think Paco LeBron had a similar situation happened to him when he kind of transitioned over. It was a lot of things kind of, you know, all residential clients come and expect the same type of thing. I don't want to give a different curve appeal, so to speak.

Well, you know, we got people in our crew, you know. We got Mr. Rodella. Jason Miller hasn't reached out to you.

Ask him. No. What is he? Do you do websites now? The Millers do everything now in Johnson City.

I know, right? We're going to be the website kings next, right? VoIP king, you know. Yeah, they're going to do everything. He's probably going to run for mayor or something soon.

I know. I don't know. I thought about that the other day.

I saw him post something and I was thinking, this guy would be a good mayor. I don't know, but do you think he could put up with the nonsense? No, he'd crack down on the nonsense, right? Get rid of it. I tell you what, Rachel as first lady, she would crack down.

That's half the package right there. I think it's a dynamic duo, right? She'd be the city controller and you'd have no budget issues. That's for sure.

Yeah, that's right. All right. Let's talk about how have things been otherwise? If there's things that go back to TechCon since then, because like I said, we haven't really talked.

What's the term? I troll everybody on the Facebook and LinkedIn, but we're all busy. I didn't go to the last TechCon. Well, the last full TechCon was last year.

We were on just before that. Yeah, and you said you could not go. You had a last minute.

I wasn't going then. I didn't do the tour thing. See what happens this year.

I mean, for me, I've just been trying to focus more on getting my business side of things, kind of letting people know and really hammering down the whole business side of things and try to say no. Sometimes it's hard for me to say no on things and it's like, yeah, I can do that. But should I be spending my time doing that type of thing? I do have a couple of residential clients that are still kind of like I call them legacy clients.

They've been around for a long time. So keep them on board. But it's primarily trying to focus on things.

I've tried the website thing. I've tried getting into that and the VoIP stuff. I'm just trying to figure out what like this things that I like and like to do as a hobby, but they don't necessarily translate to business stuff.

So I'm trying to figure out things that I enjoy doing that I'm good at and that other people need assistance with. So just trying to niche down to those things. All right.

Now, the area that you're in, Framingham. Yeah, I keep forgetting. There's a guy.

I had a college buddy that is from somewhere around there. And if I remember correctly, it's I mean, it's a it's a decent place. It's not a big city, but it's not, you know, it's not terribly close to Boston, right? No, it's I mean, realistically, probably 35 minutes on a good day.

And I mean, if you're doing that anytime, but like after hours, you're never making it there at that time. So it's there's a lot of this. It's a college town is a big decent sized school, I should say.

A lot of Boston, like a lot of people live outside of Boston and go to school. I mean, it's tons of schools around here, but I don't really. That's not really the what I'm looking for.

It's what I did kind of before. But it's so business wise. I mean, there's a lot of businesses, but it's a lot of I mean.

I mean, COVID killed a lot of a lot of places around here. There's a lot of restaurants that were just wiped out and even other things. But so it's just it's I do basically service companies.

So that's kind of like what I focus on. There's, you know, you've got a person here doing this graphic design, stuff like that, but it's primarily service based. OK, so I've done a couple of like plumbing, mechanical clients.

They weren't great clients, and I had one that actually was three businesses in one. They were plumbing was one mechanical was one. They added roofing and some other stuff and they were three separate companies.

So it was nice when they were all together and then they split. But each one still wanted me to support them and supporting them individually was absolutely ridiculous. And yes, down here, that's a. That's a tough industry, I'll say it like that, it's these companies are they're kind of like the low end of the contractor spectrum where they're just not reliable, low cost.

I mean, nobody ever wants to spend money. Yeah, like it pops into my head, I'm like, you guys probably have a gazillion A.C. companies down there. Is that fair? Of course, because everybody does it.

Yeah, you know, because nobody wants to live without A.C. So there's always opportunity. Right, right, right. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a good opportunity for you to work.

Right. With those people. Yeah.

So what's your core service up there? As in like. Like the industry that's around. Yeah, yeah.

Or yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of. Good question.

But I mean, there's a lot of light manufacturing. Oh, there's. I mean, it's probably a lot more.

Many moons ago before I was, but it's like there's a lot of this. It's a mix around me. It's very it's very there's a lot of service based companies.

There's a lot of restaurants and there's a lot of retail. I mean, my office is on Route 9, which they is like I mean, people almost make fun of it now because there's so many retail signs on Route 9. It's like just pylons after pylons. And, you know, of course, I'm part of that.

But there's a lot of a lot of retail. You know, Natick Mall is like one of the I mean, it's a huge mall, at least for our area. It is.

So I'd say retail is pretty big. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in Boston. I mean, everything's stacked together.

So there's tons of bars and restaurants there and things like that. Yeah. The one industry I'd certainly never wanted to do was the bar industry down here.

Yeah. That is just because I've had a few. Yeah.

Nothing. The whole I mean, it was one off. You know, you know, I was kind of a guy I'd call if there's a problem, but it was never a managed situation and it was never necessarily.

You know, they're focused on other things in the business. And, you know, it's not a big guy. I mean, obviously, point of sales and stuff is big in that.

Yeah, but I mean, people can fix it. People can order their equipment now through toast, you know, and all that turnkey kills us up there. Which everyone is on toast.

It's like, you know, they got those little phone things. It's. Yeah.

They got the little mini kiosks now, the tablets. It's a nice deal. If you can, you know, if you really want to resell toast, you could probably become a high end consultant.

I just I don't like the hours. Yeah, yeah. It's a totally different world.

Right. And then it's always I don't know. I'm trying to think it like emergencies.

And my clientele is very nine to five ish. Right. It's not a weekend heavy, not a night heavy thing.

But that, you know, that's almost the opposite situation. I've always thought it would be cool to be restaurant bar focus because I like the food side of things and I like cool drinks and stuff. But I think I'll just stick to that as the hobby side of things.

Yeah. I did look at the restaurant industry because you could kind of sleep in in the mornings. You know, most of them don't get going until around lunchtime, noon.

So as long as they're up and running, then you're probably OK unless there's a major issue. The dinner rush hour is probably a tough thing. But the late nights would probably the late night calls would be an issue.

So I've got one retail client that was a referral that I didn't want, but I took it because of the referral. They are working seven days a week. They do not want to be a managed client.

But they are paying monthly for some basic maintenance and firewall and backup. And I actually have to send them a notice because they have to upgrade to Windows 11. They haven't done that yet.

But they kept asking about, you know, being available on the weekends. And I'm like, I will be available if you will pay the weekend retainer. Like, no, we don't want to do that.

Do you find it almost maybe harder is not the first thing that comes to mind, but do you find it more difficult to manage a client like that than a fully managed client? Like, do you feel like it's harder to make everything happen, so to speak? Yeah, it's only in the sense that they don't really want to talk to you unless there's a problem. And then they want you to be right there. And I tell him, I said, I can't.

There's that's not going to happen. Because there are people that are paying good money. To be managed, and they're going to get the love.

And, you know, if I'm available, yeah, you'll get a response. But you can't expect that response. Yeah, you're not on an automatic delay by any means.

Right. It's usually enough going on that you're prioritizing something else. But they are tough.

So that's where I got away with the bare minimum, which I did this. So I've got two, I think it's now just two clients on that plan where it is literally just enough to cover all my tools so that I can at least have remote access if I need it. It's doing the managed antivirus web protection.

They don't have the full stack, like they're not on, you know, ThreatLocker. They're not, you know, on any of the other cyber stuff. But that's the next step.

And I actually have a plan for January 2026 that the letter goes out that because of all the issues that have been happening with cyber and ransomware and the threat of clients suing their IT professional, everybody from now on has got to be managed. I don't care what size you are, but you've got to be fully managed and you're going to have to pay. And I think the minimum for the smallest customer I looked at, I have a site with four people and they're going to be $575 as the baseline.

And they're like, we can't afford that. I'm like, sorry. It's, it's, it's, it's, I, I was, I think part of this, I mean, we see you, you know, talked about the SonicWall breach, the Discord thing.

I mean, all these things happening and it's, you could name 10 other places that things like this happen to. And it's like, I still, I'm still a big believer in the whole, like these, the small businesses, they, this idea that we're not a target because we're not big is, is, I feel like, I mean, not to get, SonicWall's huge, Discord's huge, right? But there's so many things I hear about that are like, you know, these little companies that just get, they get basically ransomed for whatever the number is. It's too, you know, too much or, or business breaking for them.

And it's, it's like, I think sometimes it's like hindsight 2020, it could have been prevented type of thing. But I think, I think education is a big thing and people learning that, like, it's not, it's not the old days of antivirus, anti-malware, you know, clean up your computer when it's done. It's, it's preventative and making sure you're watching for those threats.

And I think it's just a shift we need to make. Yeah, the fact that we now live in a world of automated bots and AI, and they are just spraying the internet looking for opportunities. And I tell them, they don't care anymore whether you're big or small.

They were just looking for anything. And I had the analogy, I'm working on this because I got a client I got to talk to on Friday where, you know, we're talking about, you know, they're just literally walking down the street looking for open windows. Yeah.

It's not like they have to plan and do all that stuff, but that's all they, it's just automated bots looking for open windows. And then people are like, well, you, we got the firewall, right? I'm like, okay, think of the firewall as a fence around your house. Most fences are either though, you know, the short white picket fence that really isn't a fence.

Or it might even be the six foot fence. But if your firewall has an open port, that's basically an open gate that people can still walk through. And if the fence is short enough that people can look over and they see an open window, the fence isn't going to stop them.

Right over, yeah. You know, I think you say walking down the street, to me, I immediately think I'm like, no, they're riding an electric bike down the street because it's that easy. They don't even, all these AI things are just doing it for them or the tools that are doing it for them.

And like people that want to do this type of stuff, this, like the whole dark side blackout stuff is all, trust me, there's plenty of tools that make anything that they want to do super easy. And it's, you know, it's not hard. And if you don't know how to do it now, there's someone that it's, it's fairly easy to figure out or pay your way into it.

So you say the AI thing and like, it's easy for us to drum up some AI article or AI website or something. And it's easy for someone to drum up an AI botnet or some sort of whatever insert infection or threat here. Yeah, it's a lot easier.

Yeah. The upgrade to that is writing down the street in a car or on a bike or a motorcycle with a, you know, garage door opener. And all you're doing is clicking to see what opens.

And, you know, if you happen to be home when your garage door opens, maybe you can stop it. But if you're not home, they're walking right in that. And then the drive by Wi-Fi stuff where they're just got a laptop looking for open Wi-Fi connections.

I mean, it's so many, so many anecdotes we can use. Oh, yeah. I mean, people I mean, it's 30 bucks on Amazon and you're crashing someone's Wi-Fi security cameras.

And that's that could be that could be an annoying thing that some doing a prank or that could be the entry, you know, to start things off to their full attack or whatever it may be. So it's I think bring these things to light and letting people know that they're that it's so it's just easy. That's the best way I can put it is a lot easier, which brings a lot more people into it.

Yeah. So what do you find as the hardest thing as you try to transition more to business only getting rid of the residential? I'm assuming that your area there's especially retail service industries. They're not used to doing all of this stuff. 

So as you're trying to focus on the security, what are you finding as either the easiest discussion to have with them versus the hardest discussion to have with them? Yeah, I think it I think it's hard. I think like we're talking about before, just getting those clients to kind of like a fully a true, fully managed situation where we're doing things like threat locker and stuff. I think that's the harder sell. 

And it's even sometimes I'll even talk to clients that like, like, you can't have the same, you know, 15 passwords. And it's, and it's like, I'll even I'll, I'll use my parents as an example, because I can, I can beat them up about it. But there's, you know, they have all these different passwords, right? And then they'll, they'll have a, you know, they'll write them down or do whatever they do with them. 

Right. And you guys should have a password manager, you don't even have to remember your passwords anymore. You just remember one, you can go lock that in a safe if you really want to, right? It's, you got to have and I show them I got a, you know, YubiKey, I got to tap it to get in or whatever, right, all this stuff.

So I said, you know, it's, it's easy to forget which password that I put with 1994? 1995? question mark, which one did I do on the end of it? And it's when people have these password problems, and they forget their accounts. And it's like, hey, it would be so easy to just have everything on a list in it, it can log you in, you know, most websites, it will just log you in, or you'll just copy and paste the password over. So these, these kind of newer, I don't think password management is new, but like, it's newer to some of the people that I talked to, at least.

It's the other things that those kind of like backups easy, you know, antivirus type of stuff is easy. You know, maintenance, I feel like is easy, like keeping updates and, and things, but the preventative maintenance and security stuff, I feel like that's a harder sell to especially people that, you know, are very break fix or something broke, I need to get right now. Yeah, this, the business is on fire, quote, unquote. 

So it's, and that's, the thing is, there's not a lot of people that want to do the break fix. Because, I mean, I can speak for myself, but it's a lot harder for me to go into a business and put a fire up when I know nothing about the business than it is, if I've been managing the business and, and something happens. And we just, we squash that threat right away. 

It's a lot easier. I mean, it sounds obvious, but even things people ask, like situations that, you know, visit a potential client or client site. And it's like, oh, you know, cameras aren't working or something.

And it's like, well, we need to know all this stuff to troubleshoot, like, and then they might not know it, they forget the password, or they don't know where that box is. Or their vendor hasn't ever, they have, you know, the guy that set it up didn't give them anything and they can't get in touch with them. No, but he, yeah.

Yeah. I know. So I'm going to do this real quick. 

So you mentioned passwords, and I know you're on your phone, so you can't necessarily see. I put in the private chat a password that I want you to look at while I do the mid-roll commercial here. Yeah.

So take a look at that and we'll chat as soon as I'm finished with this here. I just want to say, folks, that this show is, of course, brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker puts you in the driver's seat with denied by default protection, only trusted software runs while ransomware and unknown threats are blocked instantly.

Fast Allow Listing builds your inventory automatically, streamlining security for IT teams with fewer alerts and absolutely no guesswork. You can find out more about them and our other great sponsors that are here on the show and say thank you to our patrons over at itbusinesspodcast.com slash sponsors. Did you get a chance to look at that? Yes, I'm looking at it. 

I'll be completely honest. This is a weird thing for me to say. I don't know how to get out of the chat now, but I'm in it. 

I see you fade into the background, but I'm... On the phone, I don't know how. But I'm afraid to push it. Go ahead. 

We'll see what happens. I'll bring you back if you're... Okay. Doing it. 

Okay. Still here. Still here. 

All right. Yes. Yeah. 

So that was a password I had to change today because I'm onboarding a new client this week and we are setting them up with TruGrid for remote access. And that was their 365 password. The user did not know it. 

I had to get it from the current tech. And the current tech was, they had a spreadsheet of all these passwords and they would not let the users know them because one user got breached twice over the last year. And they thought that this was the best way to stop it was to change the password, not let them know it. 

And that's what they had to deal with. So can I ask, is multi-factor on that account? It is now. It wasn't.

It was not. So, I mean, in my opinion, that password, like, almost doesn't matter nowadays. I mean, it does, but there's so many things without multi-factor.

Multi-factor is, especially if you have a password manager, it's so easy to just use once you have it set up. But I get people think it's hard and difficult and cumbersome when it's set up the wrong way. You know, I got to get this thing or go log into this other program.

Yeah. And I'm not putting the password on the screen, folks. So just to give you an idea, it looks like it is about 55 to 60 characters and just literally a random set of letters and numbers and symbols, uppercase, lowercase.

And there are pieces where you can look at it and think, oh, that says the word purple. No, not really. Raccoons.

I mean, so. It's so they detect like, sorry, not to dwell on this password, but did they type that in all the time? No. So what happened is, is the previous person put in the password for them and saved it.

So that they would never have to put it in. So they. This is one of those situations where anything that had to be done, they had to call this person.

And this person supported them with TeamViewer. And if anything ever happened, they would just butt into somebody's session, not even call them and tell them, just connect in and start working. And people would be like, what must be such a pain or the free version? I don't know. 

But all I know is that when management asked me to take over part of my onboarding process is to remove TeamViewer. And that person. And I think it's, you know, maybe this is the previous person thought they were doing something good and helpful and secure.

But it ends up being such a cumbersome process that it creates this negativity in the relationship with the IT and the customer that it's like, oh, it's such a pain to do anything IT. I don't want to do it or I don't want to call. And it's, you know, I think I'm sure we all have had situations where, you know, maybe we didn't set something up the best way or something was difficult.

And, you know, we learned from it, but it's. That's I mean, that's a hard thing to do, but at the same time, I mean, there's customers that if you don't set up a password, that's crazy like that. Or even if you do that, oh, can we change it to baseball 15 exclamation point? Like you can if you want, but I wouldn't do that.

Yeah. You know, but that's why that password manager brings it around to just. It's just easy. 

You don't even have to. You don't have to remember it or need the IT guy to get in. You just.

Automatic for most. Yeah. And the biggest thing with this client, and this is probably it's a small client, it's 14, 14 people.

But this is the one I've had to sit with the most and explain to them what it is we're doing and putting in the additional safeguards. You know, they were using just the built in. McAfee that came with computers that they let expire.

There was, I mean, if it's done right, you know, you can use, you know, Defender, you can use the Microsoft tools and stuff. But this company isn't set up in Azure properly. Like three people are in Azure.

The rest of them are separate. Their usernames on the local machines are ridiculous. You know, it's like the person's first name space, the person's last name space, the name of their position.

I mean, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. It was there.

This is execution. Yeah. But I had to tell him, I said, look, we'll get through it.

We'll figure it out. And to be honest, I'm going to do a lot of the same stuff with putting protections in place so that you guys don't do anything accidentally. But it's going to be in the form of some additional software that will guard us from web protection.

And I explained to them because they're getting ThreatLocker. And I explained to them that you're going to go to try to install something and it's going to block you. And I told him, I said, it's going to block me too.

Yeah. Because we're going to live in this world of zero trust. But all you've got to do is follow the prompts, make the request.

And, you know, most of the time within a few minutes, you'll get permission. There may be times where it takes longer if we can't recognize it or it fails in the sandbox and stuff. I said, you know, don't blame the person because they didn't communicate properly what they were trying to do.

I said, I'll try to, you know, communicate as much as possible. It will be the same protection, just in a little more guided, you know, guarded way. Yeah, yeah.

So it'll be fun. And I think when you have a full, I don't know if this client will be or is, but they're a fully managed client. You probably, I would imagine you probably get to a point that there's not a bunch of random software installs, right? Like, or maybe, you know, maybe they play around with different software or something like that.

But usually once the whole, I mean, at least, or we'll say my ideal customers are in a situation where everything is deployed. If we're going to try something new, we're probably at least in the loop a little bit. And that's ideal, obviously.

I understand it doesn't happen all the time, but there's a lot. I mean, I've tried to set the expectation and idea that like, we're not just going to randomly install a bunch of stuff on our work computer. You know, it's cool.

If you want Spotify or whatever, like, that's fine. But so the threat, I mean, I'm only getting a threat locker notification when it's something that shouldn't be going on the computer. And then, great.

It's not a problem because I didn't install it. Or it's like some weird update that we haven't, you know, some rule change or something. Yeah.

I've not had the major issues that I've heard others have with threat locker. I do have one client where there's probably at least one time a day that we'll get a request from them. But it's because it's a law firm that is getting surveillance videos, medical records in these viewer programs.

You know, DICOM, Weasis, all these viewers where some of these people are still using versions from 2008. And so there's so many different, you know, viewers that, you know, people think, well, it's the same. I already have this program.

I'm like, no, you've got this version. 2012. We need 2014.

Right. So and of course, anytime it comes in, they're still getting a ton of stuff on either CDs or USB drives. So anytime they plug it in there, I keep telling him, I said, look, it's treating everything you stick into that computer as if, you know, it's a baby.

And you're like, what are you sticking in my mouth? Spit it out. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think if we can get that. The idea in that process, as I know it's hard, but as a good thing, like because of these, I think of the bad side of IT and this is like, these are the exact things how people want to get into lawyers. They want you to want you to put a bad flash drive in there.

They want you to download some plug in. That's actually not the real plug in. And it's like, though, that's how you get into these things like the real estate world, you know, all the wire fraud.

Right. I mean, that was I'm pretty sure it's still a thing. But those things.

These attack, they can easily be attack methods. You know, somebody gets in and it's easier to wait a couple of minutes for. For you to approve it.

And then, you know, then have it be something negative, in my opinion. But I get what the frustration comes from. I'm afraid to ask this question because somebody is going to email me and say, what did you watch the show in CIS? I not not enough.

OK. All right. Definitely not a show I watched consistently.

OK. But not. So that's a show that I compromised on.

It was just good enough for me to watch it. But the wife really loved that show. The original one with Gibbs, Tony and Ziva.

And then, of course, now we're watching NCIS. See, what is it? NCIS Sydney. CIS, there was an NCIS New Orleans.

I hated that one. NCIS Hawaii. I didn't like that one.

But now there's a spinoff with Tony and Ziva. And without getting into all the crap about NCIS, that show, the reason that I would consider watching it is because they have a villain that created a thumb drive called 9.4. And literally you can plug that into any system and it will find the vulnerability and get in so much so that they were using it for getting into military installations, getting into high end security systems at banks. And they were using it for this classified military drone program.

And it was just a USB drive. This USB drive is a fictional thing, right? It's not. I mean, I'm sure this exists in something.

But on the show, it's a fictional thing, right? What did you say? 94. 9.4. 9.4. Yeah. It's like a fictional thing in the show, right? Well, no.

They're showing it as real on the show. I mean, that's. Yeah.

I'm thinking it's fictional. However, I don't know if you remember, do you ever watch the movie Sneakers, Robert Redford? No. I don't think so.

So Sneakers was a movie probably from 1980 something with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, a couple of other actors that were famous now. And they had a box that looked like an answering machine with a disc that was supposed to be able to penetrate any system. And they showed them where they could tap into the Department of Defense just with that box and a phone line.

So the concept is the same, but this is. Yeah. I mean.

Have you ever heard of a USB rubber ducky? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm sure this 9.4 is a level or two above that. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it is.

Yeah. I'm assuming that they've taken the concept of rubber ducky and just 10x'd it like everything else. Because I can't imagine a thumb drive being able to circumvent all security systems.

Yeah. No, I mean, I'm sure there's things that happen. I mean, it's easy if you don't have any of the stuff that we use.

Like if you don't have ThreatLocker, like, okay, great. You can just launch a PowerShell script from a rubber ducky and boom. That's, you know, then do basically whatever you please.

Right. Yeah. But I think, you know, a lot of these things and even, you know, steps below ThreatLocker.

Like if you don't have admin access and things like that, it's, you know, hard to run certain things. But some of these things can be pretty powerful and definitely, you know, get what they want. But it's, I think 9.4 is, we've yet to run into that.

Yeah, it sounds crazy. I'm going to assume it's crazy, but it's actually an interesting show. Yeah.

No, it's, no, that sounds interesting. I probably would like it. I just never, of course, I've heard of it.

It's a huge franchise, right. But I've never just never got into it. But yeah.

Yeah. There's a couple of shows I got to watch now just because it's, you know, quick GoPro. You know, she watches my stuff.

So I got to watch hers. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's going to set up a Plex server.

I don't have time for that. Between work, the podcast and, you know, the little bit of time that I spend with her in between work and podcasting, we go home, we have dinner, we watch a show. Pool time.

What was that? Pool time. Pool time. Yeah.

Actually, I have to have pool time this weekend. We've got guests coming in. So, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's like 30 degrees the other day morning. It's cool.

So right now, pool season is close. Right. I mean, it's definitely not swimmable.

It's get out. Is it that cold? Really? No, no, no. It's not.

It's not. It was one morning. I said, like, this, this last one was by Monday.

It's freezing. But I'm right now outside. It's probably.

Probably 50 degrees at best. That's still cold. I mean, the pool is freezing.

It's an ice bath. Yeah, it's too cold. 50 is almost iguana freezing weather down here.

Oh, yeah. Let me ask this last question here. So I had a. Video earlier with Chad Kemp, our Canadian friend from up north, and we were having the discussion of, you know, MSP versus the man in the van.

And one of the things that we had in our original discussion 10 years ago was the idea of, you know, having the right tools and things. Now, 10 years ago, I don't think we had nearly as many tools in our stack as we do now, whether it's platforms or whatever. Last week, was it? Two weeks ago, because it was Thursday before my peer meeting, I was going through all the stuff in my stack.

And I'm talking, you know, everything from RMM antivirus to dashboards to everything, you know, and I included things like nine night that I still use. And, you know, the Malwarebytes tool set and stuff like that. And I counted 23.

That I use not all the time for everyone, but 23, which is a lot. I know there are some studies out there that show that, you know, the average MSP has 12 or 18 or whatever it is. Do you have an idea of how many you have? And how do you go about deciding, you know, what to bring into your stack versus what to kick out? Yeah, it's actually funny you say that because I was just talking to my brother about, we were talking just app ideas.

And I was telling him all these different things we use to do what I do. And I think I wrote out like 17 because like his world is, he has no idea really what an MDM or an RMM is. So I'm listing out all these different things like that we use.

And I think it was 17, but that doesn't, I mean, there's, I mean, even whether it's a physical tool or a software tool, I mean, I'm kind of a... I didn't even count physical tools. Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, I mean, I got so many different things that I like, and I might be playing with 10 different things that I don't end up landing on.

But it's, there's a lot of stuff that like, that is IT related, that doesn't necessarily translate into the business stuff and things that don't necessarily fly. And I don't end up liking it. But I mean, there's a lot of stuff.

And I'm not necessarily surprised by your 23. And I feel like someone, you know, might beat our numbers. But I do, after I said that to him, and, you know, I'm texting him all these different things.

And it's like, like, man, this is a lot of stuff. I'm trying to think of another industry that has so many different things that have to be used to make the job happen. And I think it's, you know, it's easy with physical tools, an electrician or a plumber or whatever.

But like, you know, I don't know, pick another industry. It's, I feel like it's hard to beat those, the amount of tools that MSPs use. Yeah. 

I thought about the autobody or mechanic, because I know like the mechanic that I go to where, you know, they've got specialized tools just for one job. You know, they've got their tire alignment kit, but that thing is massive and expensive. They've got their diagnostic tool they put in.

They've got, you know, of course, they've got their toolbox with all their specialized torque wrenches and, you know, different sizes. So I think physical tools, they would kill us. But in terms of software, I can't think of anything outside of an MSP because even an enterprise, unless you're a massive enterprise, you're not going to have a ton of, you're going to streamline everything to a couple of dashboards and remote support.

We've got so many. And like I said, I didn't count my physical tools, which I mean, my go bag alone is probably another 10 to 15. Oh, yeah. 

It's definitely, I mean, I'm like, I'm actually curious if anyone ends up knowing a line of business that does beat that. But like, like you said, even if it now, if you're saying a big enterprise, like you say, insert giant company here that has a bunch of, you know, they have their, their line of business software. And even if they have an internal IT department, we're not going to include the IT tools, right? Or are we? I see, I guess that's the thing is, is what's included in the stack.

Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't count line of business anything, even though a lot of them have their own diagnostic tools that you may have to have. As part of that, I know, for instance, my law firms have, let's see, Time Matters, there's actually diagnostic tools for Time Matters. But that's not something I would keep as part of my stack. 

I would just have access to that for that client. So we'd have to think about that. What is your stack? Assuming it would be direct tools that you use to manage and or support? Because the average client, like, I mean, there's so many, I think of things, you say dashboards, and it's like, Oh, I gotta have, I have a login for this dashboard that only a couple people have because, you know, it faded away.

Or like, we don't use that product anymore, but there's still some people on it. Right. I think a hotspots is a couple, you know, stupid dashboard, like, we're, we're literally talking about, I'm like, I wish, I mean, this is a, this is almost don't even like this phrase, but a single pane of glass.

Yeah, that ain't happening. And it's, it's just, I would love to see it happen. But it's just, it's so much constantly changing. 

Like, even if you're really great with APIs and integrations, there's so many different tools. And so many different ways of doing it that it's like, how do you, you know, just like, I mean, the car industry is a really good analogy, because like, the same, you know, fuel, fuel line disconnect for Ford is not going to be the same tool as an Audi, right? And they got to have that one tool does that one stupid little thing. But they got to have it or they got to have some way to do it, right? Or they're not going to be able to get the fuel lines off of those cars.

So it's like, that's a, that's a very specialty industry and physical tools, but it's, I mean, there's a lot of diagnostic software. But I mean, I think if we take a, I don't know, just say, like, McDonald's, right? Not 23, you know, anywhere close. No, because outside is technically, so I worked at McDonald's. 

I'm sure it is way different now than it was when I worked for them. But I remember, I mean, each of the machines, yeah, they kind of had their software, but those were, you know, like the manufacturer built in machine. And I'm sure most, that wouldn't be something but outside of the POS and the management software, it's probably those two items.

And the POS at night would pour into the management system, and then the management system would upload to corporate. That was it. No, I'm thinking of the corporate side too.

Oh, you think, okay, corporate side. They used to manage all their projects, like they use a monday.com or something like that. They use a, you know, whatever.

Okay, so you're thinking about all those things. Okay, so that's, that would bring a whole different level to it. Interesting. 

You know what? So my wife worked for LA Weight Loss. And so they had, so she worked as a store manager here, and then she worked as a regional manager in the Atlanta area and managed eight stores. And so this, it's probably not fair to them because we're still talking 2012, but they were still doing spreadsheets and faxing them in.

Yeah. It's how ridiculous that was. I think people would be surprised at how many legacy type things still happen in industries, but I mean, that's, I'm less surprised in 2012, I'd be a little more shocked.

Yeah, I would have to believe that they've automated that now. I mean, even if it's a software program, you just upload your numbers and then click send. Yeah. 

I mean, even if you're still doing spreadsheets, you should not be manually entering stuff like that. Like, I don't know what they're using spreadsheets for, but you can automate a lot of that stuff nowadays. So my retail store, it uses, what's that big, the big store platform? Starts with S. Toast? Or like Point of Sales or something? Well, it's a store. 

It's the big store software. They use it for like, people use it for, not eBay, Etsy. Oh, yeah.

Shopify? Yes. Shopify. Yeah.

There's a platform that for a lot of people, it integrated all that stuff for them. Yep. I have to think about that.

I mean, think of like, if you think of the Shopify industry, it's huge for online sales, right? And it's probably the king. I mean, it's not definitely, but now think of all the other things that that world wants to sell you to make Shopify better, right? Oh, yeah. So it's like, oh, you can't do this in Shopify, but if you buy this little side app, it's $10 a month, you can now do this, this and this.

And then I feel like sometimes it gets that way in our industry where it's like, you have this whole like, you think of Microsoft Office or Google Drive, right? Or Google Docs and all that whole suite. It's a lot you can do in there, right? But then, you know, somebody wants to make an add on for that to make you do, or like, you can manually, you can, not saying this is not advisable, but you can make an invoice in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, right? And then someone will make an app that will make it easy to make that thing or make it integrate with something else. So I feel like there's all these, it's easy to get this, what do they call it? Like, they call it stack creep or like... Tool sprawl.

Tool sprawl, yeah. And then you just get all these things and then you go back and look at them like, what am I, you know? Yeah. If the number became 30, you might go, oh, geez, you know, we got to knock off some stuff here.

Well, to circle this back around to a question I asked you about earlier, your website, if you're doing the WordPress thing, WordPress has a ton of plugins. Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, it's, I looked at, I was on a website that I bought some years ago and I looked at it and I'm like, oh my God, why did I buy that thing? And I never ended up using it. 

And it's still like, great, I still have that in my account or whatever. But I'm like, I don't know, it's, that's my thing is like, I think I'm going to do it great. And then I'll end up just, I like to prove myself wrong in the statement and actually end up doing a really great website.

But I'll usually get frustrated with how long it's taking me and then I'll throw money at it and say like, oh, just make this happen. And then it's, you know, go on from there. All right. 

Do you have a target date for that website? No. I do not, no. Okay.

I mean, it's been, yeah, it's a priority, but I mean, as with anything else, it's just, it gets put on the back burner sometimes. And like, I've been really focusing on the last month and getting all the, like, I want all my content together and ready to go and put everything up there. I feel like the, you know, the homepage and stuff, that's like, that's easy and like, you know, basic stuff.

But like, I want to have the stuff that I never had on the old website and be able to, you know, have people not wonder what I do. They shouldn't be asking what I do. It should be self-explanatory on the website.

And, you know, a lot of people, people don't always necessarily know that I do something because it was never on the website. You know, it was never, oh, I didn't know you did that. I didn't know you did data recovery or whatever.

And, you know, that was something I didn't have on the website for a long time. But it's, you know, something I always did and still do. But I don't focus on it as much as I used to in the residential stuff.

All right. And what about that YouTube channel? Like a chat GPT coach thing, like a couple months ago. And it was one of those like talking, maybe it was, maybe it was Gemini, but it was like, hey, if you really like doing videos, that's something you should leverage.

And I'm like, oh, OK, thanks. And I'm like, you know, I thought about it. It's just it's like, you know, honestly, I've always wondered how you guys do it and like have time to like make.

I mean, here I am doing it with you, but like but obviously there's a lot of things that happened before this video is a thing. Right. Yeah. 

But it's time management and figuring all that out and streamlining things that open up that time for me. But. You know, new daughter on the way, kind of that or that was on the way and actually was born, you know, that's kind of a takes up a lot of time, but.

It's for life takes priority. So, yeah, a lot of changes there. I was just I was just razzing you there.

I just don't know. Yeah, no, it's and it's you know, you're not any harder than my wife. She asked me where the website was the other day, too. 

So it's getting there. All right. Well, Kyle, thank you for coming on the show and chatting.

And it's good. And hopefully we'll see out and about. I don't have any trips planned up to the northeast anytime soon. 

I will be in Philly in two weeks for the ASCII Cup. But that's it. I'll see where the ASCII trips are for next year. 

And I think I may have to squeeze in a Toronto trip that I don't want to go to but figure it out. You're doing some ASCII. Are you doing stuff with the podcast there? Yeah. 

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I got a meeting on Thursday because we're going to we're going to do something special, I think, in honor of Alan Weinberger's passing.

The founder of ASCII that passed away. So we're going to talk about doing something for him while I'm there. Yeah. 

Awesome. I'll look forward to catching some of that stuff. All right.

Well, folks, thank you for hanging out with us and for listening to the show here. Tonight's guest, Kyle Kenyon, the pro tech guy out of Massachusetts. And yes, he does do data recovery, computer repair, IT consulting, custom workstations, Wi-Fi networks.

What else you got in there? Oh, geez. If you get me excited about something, I'll probably say yes. Definitely some weird little projects I'm always working on. 

So. All right. His information will be in the show notes, folks, if you want to check him out and probably will be at the next TechCon Unplugged, I think, if we know it's going to be in Atlanta.

It's going to be in Atlanta. So. Reach out to Paco and get more information on that.

But thanks a lot, folks, for tuning in. That's going to do it for this week's live show of the IT Business Podcast. Head over to the website and click on the follow button if you want to make sure you catch us whenever we do a show or whenever an audio one publishes and follow us on the social medias.

That's going to do it. We'll see you all soon.Holla!