welcome to the Cybertrops podcast.
This is a special live event edition of the show.
Uh, we're here at the Inch 360 event in beautiful Spokane, Washington.
And today we have Peter Gregory.
Peter's from GCI.
Welcome, Peter, to, uh, Cybertron's
podcast.
Great.
Thank you, Jethro.
It's nice to be here.
And, um, I'm very grateful for GCI because GCI was a sponsor for, uh, Leadership
Summit that I did several years ago, and, uh, when I lived in Alaska, and,
uh, GCI's always been a great company, so it's great to, uh, Reconnect with
anybody from GCI because you guys have been a supporter of my work in the past.
So I appreciate it
Oh, yeah, very very good GCI is very bullish on community support
and yeah does lots of sponsorships Scholarships and so forth and really
goes all in for serving all of Alaska
Yeah, for sure.
So, uh, what brings you down here to Spokane to
this event, though?
So, I live in, uh, central Washington State, just a couple hours away,
and, uh, I haven't been to as many security conferences this year, and
when I saw this one come up, I thought, great, an opportunity to meet some,
meet some local cyber professionals, and, you know, some that I know
already, and meet a few new folks.
Learn a few things, uh, and just some local networking.
Yeah, awesome.
Very good.
So, uh, you came to this conference for the networking, getting to know people.
Do you serve Washington as well or just Alaska?
Uh, GCI serves just, uh, the state of Alaska.
Gotcha, okay, that's what I thought.
it's always good to connect with people anywhere you go and anywhere you live.
tell us what your main takeaway is from this conference so far today.
The main takeaway is that I've learned more about, the What is it?
Inch 360 organization.
This is my first event that I've attended.
I'm interested in getting involved in local things and have for many years.
I've lived in Washington State for 30 years.
Most of that in Seattle, but the last six years in Central Washington.
I'm just interested in getting involved in the community.
Yeah,
awesome.
And so, working for a company that is in Alaska, uh, I imagine you
probably travel up there sometimes.
Uh, from time to time.
Every few months, uh, I'm in Alaska for a week or so.
Uh
huh.
Uh, which is awesome, because I love Alaska.
So, that's good.
but what's amazing about the way the world works is that you can live down here in
Washington and, and still be able to.
Do that work from here and not have to be there physically.
And so what is your role?
What do you do at GCI
for sure?
And I, I've been a full time remote employee for 10 years.
I've been in GCI about three and a half years.
I'm the senior director of cyber GRC.
Uh, I have many functions in cybersecurity, including, but not limited
to risk management controls, policy, privacy, third party risk management.
Uh, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Data Governance, Data,
uh, Records Management and Retention and a few other things besides.
Man, that's a lot of stuff that you're, that you're over.
So with that, what kinds of things are you thinking about that people
need to know about right now as it relates to those things?
One thing that's on my mind a lot in one of the talks today, uh, zeroed in on
this, uh, is security awareness training and the fact that every worker in an
organization, regardless of their role, needs to have some working knowledge of
safe practices, things to always do, other things to never do, uh, because those,
uh, decisions could, result in a great deal of harm to themselves personally
or to their organization or both.
Yeah.
And so what are, what are some of those things that, give me a couple
that everybody should do and a couple that people should definitely not do?
So a few examples is Slow down when you're reading your email and think,
give yourself a couple of seconds before clicking on anything in any
message, even messages that are internal or appear to be internal,
uh, by people that you work with.
we, we're busy, but you, you can give, definitely.
Wait a few seconds.
Just give it a little bit of thought.
Does this look right?
Am I expecting to hear from them?
But before acting rashly and it's hard to slow down people want to just click
quickly through things and and get their work done and Cyber criminals count on the
fact that we're too hasty at what we do.
We don't slow down to think and that's why Fishing works for cybercriminal
organizations because they only need one or two people in an organization
to click to give them that beachhead which could be a part of a longer
term campaign that could be very costly for that organization.
Yeah, yeah.
And, uh, so that's one of the things that you should do is slow down.
Okay?
And then one of the things you shouldn't do is, uh, Click on anything that you're
not sure about where it came from.
Any other quick advice?
Well, a few of the things in cyber hygiene, there's so many, but another
one that comes to mind is, regardless of what we're able to do on the laptops or
desktops issued to us by our employers, we should refrain from installing any
other tools or software that Maybe we've used before or at home or in another job
or something that we read about, there are many good, trusted, safe tools out
there, but there are also many that have Trojans in them or are harmful in, in
some way that may not be, obvious on the surface, um, there are unscrupulous,
tool and application vendors and there are also those that don't practice very
good hygiene, and they get compromised.
Solar winds is the classic example
today.
Yeah, yeah for sure.
this was great to chat with you.
Great to connect with you.
Thank you for coming out here.
Is there any other things you'd like to say to our audience,
people all over the country?
Slow down and think about what you're doing on, on your computer and, and
think about the potential consequences.
If you are not an expert in cyber, find one.
find a good book somewhere that can help you understand a little bit more about
what good cyber hygiene is all about.
That will, help keep you out of trouble.
Yeah, and I think, uh.
A cyber hygiene, podcast would be beneficial to talk about, go more into
depth on each of those things and, and how you can have good hygiene.
So that's a, that's an idea for me for the future.
You know it.
Thanks for being part of the show.
Appreciate it.
Great.
Thank you, Jethro.