Off the Wire: A Play by Play on Cybersecurity and Technology Issues

Business Continuity Plans: Why They’re Hard, Why They Matter, and How to Build One

Tanner and Anthony discuss why business continuity plans (BCPs) are often one of the last cybersecurity “baseline” goals organizations complete, largely due to documentation burdens and the fear of committing to recovery metrics. They clarify how a BCP differs from an incident response plan, emphasizing that BCPs define how to maintain or restore operations after major disruptions using recovery time objectives and acceptable data loss. They outline practical ways to build a plan using NIST guidance, peers, and industry templates, and cover key components including defined roles with backups, tiering critical systems, backup/retention details, known alternatives, recovery strategies with dependencies and workarounds, communication plans with update cadence and message templates, and regular testing and review. They also note tailoring plans to each organization and avoiding unnecessary separate documents.

00:00 Intro & Why Business Continuity Planning Matters
01:59 Recovery Time Objectives and Metrics
03:56 Why Put Metrics on Paper: Fears and Benefits
06:07 Why Build a BCP: Reasons, Structure, and Tiers Overview
13:17 Risk Assessment and Incident Levels
16:10 Defining System Criticality Tiers
26:55 Building Known Alternatives into Each Tier
36:14 Wrap-up

ABOUT OFF THE WIRE

Off the Wire is a podcast on cybersecurity and IT leadership for the electric cooperative and small business world. Real operations, real tradeoffs, and the decisions that actually keep the lights on. Hosted by Anthony Kent and Tanner.

Subscribe for new episodes, and if this was useful, leave a comment with how your team handles continuity planning.

#BusinessContinuity #ElectricCooperative #ITLeadership #Cybersecurity #DisasterRecovery

How to Get an IT Headcount Proposal Approved: Speak in Risk, Value, and Data

The hosts discuss how IT leaders can successfully propose adding staff when teams are overextended and work keeps piling up. They emphasize starting with the real problem—unmet business value, security/compliance risk, cyber insurance requirements, ticket backlogs, and burnout/retention risk—then backing the request with data such as project lists, vulnerability and compliance gaps, device and ticket growth, peer staffing comparisons, and feedback from other departments. They advise focusing on responsibilities and business impact rather than job titles, researching comparable organizations carefully, and presenting alternatives like contractors, interns, or part-time roles with true fully loaded costs. The conversation also covers delivery tactics: have an in-person sit-down, be confident and prepared, time the meeting well, seed the narrative in advance, rehearse tough questions (including via AI role-play), and keep a tiered fallback plan with follow-ups if the answer is no.

00:00 Intro
02:04 Keep the List
05:10 Start With the Problem
08:00 Do Your Research
10:19 Responsibilities Over Titles
13:40 Weigh the Alternatives
17:16 The Real Cost of a Hire
18:24 Delivering the Proposal
20:52 Timing the Ask
22:20 Plant the Seeds Early
25:20 Rehearse It (and Use AI)
28:15 Have a Fallback Plan
31:53 Final Thoughts
33:40 Outro

Keywords: IT headcount proposal, how to justify new IT staff, IT staffing business case, getting headcount approved, building a business case for hiring, IT budget proposal, IT leadership, IT management, IT workforce planning, understaffed IT team, IT burnout and retention, cybersecurity staffing, compliance risk, cyber insurance requirements, ticket backlog, fully loaded cost of an employee, contractors vs full-time, presenting to leadership, executive buy-in, electric cooperative IT, utility IT, SMB IT, Off the Wire podcast

#ITLeadership #Cybersecurity #ITManagement #ITStaffing #ElectricCooperative #SMBIT #ITStrategy #OffTheWire

Why Hardware Prices Are Skyrocketing in 2026 (RAM, SSDs, Servers) — and What You Can Do

Hardware budgets are breaking. Quotes that were good for 30 days are now expiring in hours. That $80k workstation quote? It's $160k now. That server quote near $1M? Already $1.3M — and climbing. In this episode, Tanner and Anthony break down what's actually driving the spike in RAM, SSDs, hard drives, servers, and networking gear — and it's not just tariffs. AI data center buildouts are pulling manufacturers toward high-margin HBM memory (roughly 10x the margin of standard DRAM), leaving everything else fighting for supply. With only three major players (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) and factory expansions that take 2-3 years, relief isn't coming fast.

More importantly — what do you do about it right now? They cover practical steps: faster approval cycles, buying ahead, standardizing hardware, right-sizing, considering refurb and used gear, extended refresh cycles, cloud compute, and leasing. Plus how to brief leadership before the budget conversation catches you off guard.

This one's for anyone managing IT budgets at a lean organization — co-op, municipal, small enterprise. The volatility is real and it's not going away anytime soon.

00:00 Truck Price Shock Skit

01:54 Hardware Quotes Going Wild

02:46 Real World Sticker Stories

04:36 Why Memory Costs Surge

07:01 HBM vs DRAM Margins

09:08 Factories Tariffs New Normal

13:44 Beyond RAM Storage Crunch

16:53 Quotes Expire Faster Than Ever

20:23 Practical Ways To Cope

26:36 Refurb Longer Cycles Cloud

32:21 When Relief Might Come

37:01 Wrap Up Lead With Communication

Off the Wire is a cybersecurity and IT leadership podcast for practitioners at small-to-medium organizations and electric cooperatives.

The SaaSpocalypse: How AI Is Killing (and Reshaping) SaaS Tools

In this episode of Off The Wire, Anthony and Tanner discuss the “SaaSpocalypse”—how AI is disrupting and potentially replacing many SaaS products—citing examples like Figma being hit after Claude Design launched, reduced need for Canva due to AI tools, and vulnerable niche apps like Grammarly as Copilot and Google tools bake AI directly into core suites. They debate whether AI pricing is currently subsidized, noting high API, hardware, and power costs that could drive subscriptions much higher over time. They explore how AI could become the primary interface layer, reducing the need for traditional web UIs and even replacing documentation platforms by querying SharePoint-backed datasets through an agent. For IT leaders, they recommend evaluating SaaS at renewal time, starting with narrow tools, moving gradually, and prioritizing cost savings while accounting for change management and human behavior.

00:00 SaaSpocalypse Explained

00:14 Figma And Canva Wakeup Call

01:35 SaaS Vendors Racing To Add AI

02:53 Why AI Pricing Will Rise

07:25 Which Tools Are Most Vulnerable

11:20 AI As The New Interface Layer

16:47 Advice For CIOs And IT Leaders

25:10 LinkedIn And The AI Slop Problem

31:00 Final Takeaways And Wrap Up

Anthropic’s “Mythos” Leak, Project Glasswing, and the 90-Day Patch Countdown

Hosts Tanner and Anthony discuss reports of Anthropic’s new “frontier” general-purpose model, Mythos (Mythos Preview), described as exceptionally strong at finding and exploiting novel security bugs and allegedly sitting on thousands of unpatched zero-days affecting major operating systems and browsers. They review examples cited, including decades-old FreeBSD and OpenBSD flaws and a Linux kernel issue, and note a separate security firm (Aisle) replicated parts of the findings using open-weight models, though Mythos appears better at moving from detection to exploitation. The episode explains how Mythos became public via leaks, then outlines Anthropic’s Project Glasswing: about 50 vendors received 90 days of access plus credits to patch systems, with Mozilla reportedly patching 271 Firefox issues. They close with preparation steps for lean IT teams: asset inventory, vendor outreach, risk-based prioritization, mitigation and isolation, patch validation, workload planning, governance and insurance review, stronger detection controls, least privilege/zero trust, and verifying backups.

00:00 Too Dangerous to Release

01:45 Meet Mythos Preview

02:25 Zero Days Found

05:19 Can Others Replicate It

06:46 Efficiency and Edge Models

08:17 Leaks and Access Blunders

10:42 Project Glasswing Explained

15:10 90 Day Clock and Fallout

16:24 Break and Subscribe

17:05 Prep Plan for IT Teams

19:05 Patching Priorities and Testing

21:00 Controls Backups and Wrap Up

24:02 Final Thoughts and Sign Off

OT Security Part 4: Why OT Monitoring Is Now a Necessity (Tools, Baselines, and Incident Response)

In this Off the Wire episode, Tanner and Anthony wrap part four of their OT security miniseries by focusing on OT monitoring and why it’s needed, noting that over 90% of small and medium businesses with OT environments lack monitoring and that AI is lowering the time and effort required for attacks. They explain how legacy OT systems were built without security, often use unencrypted or proprietary protocols, and can’t run agent-based tools like EDR, making specialized monitoring essential. The discussion covers how monitoring complements preventive controls, helps establish a communications baseline, flags anomalies (like unexpected east-west traffic), supports forensics and log retention, integrates alerts with email and SIEMs, and validates segmentation and documented exceptions.

They also debunk the “air-gapped OT” myth, stress mapping all IT/OT bridges, recommend an OT-specific incident response plan, and list tool options including Malcolm, Security Onion, Dragos (free under $100M revenue), and vendors like Darktrace, Tenable OT, Cisco Cyber Vision, Nozomi, and SCADAfence, alongside drivers like NERC CIP, CMMC, mandates, and cyber insurance.

00:00 Recording The Intro

00:02 Why OT Monitoring Matters

00:31 Small Targets AI Threat

02:31 OT Risks Real World Impact

05:39 OT Is A Different Animal

08:35 Baselines For Segmentation

10:03 Air Gap Myth Bridges

12:09 SCADA Migration Opportunity

13:21 Realistic OT Attack Chain

15:47 What to Monitor in OT

16:11 Five Key Visibility Signals

19:21 OT Incident Response Planning

20:27 Picking Monitoring Tools

22:41 Compliance and Budget Levers

24:13 OT Security Checklist

26:52 Final Thoughts and Next Episode

Managing Third-Party Remote Access: Tools, Risks, and Practical Tips (Off the Wire Part 3)

In part three of Off the Wire’s four-part miniseries, the hosts discuss third-party remote access risks and why VPNs with MFA alone are insufficient, citing major breaches like Target and Toyota and a 2023 vendor compromise as wake-up calls. They review third-party access tools (BeyondTrust/Bomgar, SecureLink, ManageEngine PAM360, and OT-focused options like Claroty and Slo), explaining benefits such as role-based access control, detailed logging and session recording, layered approvals, session time limits, vendor-managed user provisioning, automatic deprovisioning, individual accountability, passwordless access, and rapid access shutdown when relationships end.

They describe these tools as proxy-based “airlocks” that prevent lateral movement and enable oversight. Implementation advice includes treating it as non-negotiable while documenting exceptions, requiring ticket numbers, routing requests via chat, ensuring multiple approvers, sending logs to a SIEM, updating incident response plans, auditing access annually, and providing vendors a setup one-pager.

00:00 Third Party Access Intro

01:19 Why VPN Is Not Enough

01:51 Real World Breach Examples

02:44 Wake Up Call Story

04:33 Tool Options Overview

06:11 Key Features And Benefits

14:39 How These Tools Work

16:51 Vendor Pushback And Compliance

21:49 Implementation Tips Checklist

26:59 Wrap Up And Final Tip

OT Security Miniseries: Securing the Browser to Protect IT and OT Networks

In this Off the Wire Podcast OT miniseries episode based on the Dragos OT report, the hosts explain how OT environments are often compromised through IT networks and focus on the browser as a major attack target alongside email. They discuss practical ways to harden browser security, including DNS filtering (with examples like blocking newly registered domains and improving visibility), CIS browser hardening benchmarks and policies (updates, extension restrictions, disabling built-in password saving, limiting browsers), and the role of secure web gateways/web proxies with SSL inspection and DLP considerations. They also cover enterprise password managers, passkeys, and new enterprise browser tools that provide granular controls and DLP for web apps (including AI use cases), plus how EDR and SIEM telemetry support detection and response. They close with a recommended rollout order and preview upcoming episodes on third-party vendor management and OT network monitoring.

00:00 Mini Series Setup

00:43 Why Browsers Are Targeted

03:43 DNS Filtering Basics

06:41 Remote Protection Benefits

09:06 CIS Browser Hardening

11:30 Locking Down Extensions

14:11 Secure Web Gateway Proxies

16:56 Subscribe and Share

17:43 Enterprise Password Managers

19:23 Password Manager Benefits

20:22 Hosting and Vendor Risks

21:12 Passkeys and Unique Logins

23:37 KeyPass and Offline Vaults

24:05 Enterprise Browser Overview

25:53 DLP and Download Controls

26:40 BYOD Visibility and AI Policies

30:21 AI Extensions and Control

32:14 EDR and SIEM Telemetry

35:37 Layering Tools Before EDR

36:54 Practical Rollout Roadmap

40:55 OT Tie In and Next Episodes