Tag Archives: RipRap Security

Nonprofit Radio for July 14, 2025: We’ve Been Hacked! & Smart Data Storage

 

Steve Sharer & Danielle Elizer: We’ve Been Hacked!

Our panel from the 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#25NTC), helps you with actionable takeaways to strengthen your incident response plan. You do have an incident response plan, right? They reveal the right responses and responsibilities for your leadership, IT, communications, and other key roles. They’re Steve Sharer from RipRap Security and Danielle Eliser with Chef Ann Foundation.

Brian Cavanaugh & Tiffany Nyklickova: Smart Data Storage

Brian Cavanaugh and Tiffany Nyklickova want you to avoid common data pitfalls while ensuring your data is smart, secure and searchable. They consider the pros and cons of cloud versus onsite storage, and explain how folder structures, filenames and metadata make your data organized and easy to retrieve. Brian is at The Vilcek Foundation and Tiffany is from Services in Action. This is also part of our 25NTC coverage.

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. And I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of Salpingium fraxis if I had to hear that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s coming. Hey Tony, this week we return to our 25 NTC coverage with. We’ve been hacked. Our panel from the 2025 nonprofit technology conference helps you with actionable takeaways to strengthen your incident response plan. You do have an incident response plan, right? They reveal the right responses and responsibilities for your leadership, IT, communications, and other key roles. They are Steve Scherer from a riprap Security and Danielle Ellizeer with Chef Anne Foundation. Then Smart data storage. Brian Kavanagh and Tiffany Nilikova want you to avoid common data pitfalls while ensuring your data is smart, secure, and searchable. They consider the pros and cons of cloud versus on-site storage and explain how folder structures, file names, and metadata make your data organized and easy to retrieve. Brian is at the Vilcek Foundation, and Tiffany is from Services in Action. On Tony’s take 2. Self-care. Here is, we’ve been hacked. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference at the Baltimore Convention Center. Our coverage is sponsored by Heller Consulting, technology consulting for nonprofits. With me now are Steve Scherer and Danielle Elliser. Steve is CEO and co-founder of Rip Riprap Security, and Danielle Elliser is senior director of technology at Chef and Foundation. Steve, Danielle, welcome. Thanks so much. Thanks. Thank you. Last year’s NTC as well. Um, your session topic. We’ve been hacked! exclamation mark an interactive incident response tabletop exercise workshop. It’s a lot there, yeah, but you did, yeah, there’s only one verb in all that, right? There is only one verb in all that in that in those two sentences. Um, Steve, our resident security expert, uh, why don’t you give us a High level view of what your session covered yesterday, yeah, yeah, so our session was all about how to prepare for a cybersecurity incident and how one of the main ways that you can prepare is by undergoing a tabletop exercise to simulate what an an incident is like uh with your staff before you actually have an incident so you get a chance of what it feels like and. And what you should be doing and if your plans are are set up in a way that’s actually gonna help you. All right, now we’re not gonna have the luxury of an exercise here on nonprofit radio, but I know you both have takeaways, uh, either from the strategies in general, but also maybe takeaways from yesterday’s session. Um, so let’s see, uh, Danielle, why don’t you, why don’t you start with some substance like what should we be thinking about? This is all in preparation. Uh, so we’re not gonna have, like I said, we’re not gonna be doing the exercise, but what should we be thinking about in advance so that when we do call Steve because we’ve been hacked, uh, his response can be, I guess, as as seamless as possible or at least we’re we’re best prepared as we can be for the for the what we hope never happens. Sure, um, I think the big thing we realized when we were putting this presentation together was that a a tabletop game is very similar to a cybersecurity incident and that. You have some rules but you don’t know all of the information and it’s going to change and you are not gonna be able to predict where you go um and so you really have to be flexible when an incident occurs I think the first step is calling someone trusted or having someone on your team to cover the security um and then just giving them as much information that you know. And working from there um it’s a really flexible process that you have to be able to pivot through um depending on what you find out. So you really would like to know who you’re gonna be calling. Maybe maybe it’s two different teams in case one is not available or something or. I step one is have somebody on your phone, yeah, um, because time is of the essence um and you don’t have a lot of time to spare so knowing who you’re gonna call is is probably the the first step, um. We were very fortunate that when we had an incident we had riprap um already contracted with us and they were my very first call and they jumped in right away um so knowing who you have on your team that’s gonna be able to help support you is gonna be such such an easier path than. Trying to figure it out when you’re in the crisis. Yeah, I mean you’d be interviewing firms in the midst of a crisis. Your head is not gonna be on the the interview process and you know what’s your timeline and what’s our budget? I mean, we need to, right, so these things all need to be in place should be having these conversations. Now unfortunately it’s very common to find somebody while you’re in the middle of a crisis. I know um Steve has mentioned that a little bit of they often get these panicked calls and you know everybody jumps on board and does the best they can but it’s so much easier to have somebody beforehand. Oh, they don’t know your platforms, they don’t know your user base. I mean, well, Steve is gonna tell us all the things that he wants to know when you make that call. Um, what can you share about the the chef Anne hacking? Yeah, so I’ll keep it general, um, we had actually started working with Rip rap a couple of months prior and so we had some things in place but not nearly we weren’t, you know, robust uh in the way that we had hoped and um you know we just started getting prepared and uh and an email came through to our accounting department they had they had the right form they had the right invoice they had everything looked good um I was like oh my gosh, we have to get this check out by the end of this week. Can you guys just make this happen? Everything looked good. Um, and somebody within our accounting platform just flagged it a little bit of like this is unusual usually I hear about this beforehand and pass it up to me or instinct instinct is Steve instinct for sure there’s a ton of value and instincts, yeah, for sure. I mean it’s that listen to your gut that if it looks weird, smells weird, it most likely is weird yeah yeah a flag like this person in accounting, and she was even apologetic too. She was like, I, I just don’t wanna bother you and I was like, oh no, no, no. You think this is weird? I think this is weird. Let’s go, um, and so we were able to bring in riprap immediately and resolve it, um, and thankfully there was no impact, um, we caught it early, but I I can’t overstate how quick it was, um, and how um unexpected it was, you know, it was a random Tuesday, you know, like nobody expects this on a Tuesday, um. And so it was really, really, really beneficial to have somebody on our side already um and just not something we ever expected even though we had already been preparing with them. So it can really happen to anyone. And after the fact that you rip wrap like maybe did forensic work for you or something. Did you figure out was it, was it uh based on artificial intelligence or had they penetrated part of your system to, to get the, you said it looked authentic, it had, it had the right data and what how did they how did they get what they needed to make it look so good? Yeah, um. I’m trying to remember, this is about a year ago. Yeah, so a lot of times the attackers will try to um Illicit like payment forms, invoice forms from organizations by pretending to be somebody that’s maybe in the world or in the network saying hey we’re a new vendor, and they’ll get some of this paperwork already um even if they haven’t conducted a breach of the actual nonprofit so that that wasn’t their case luckily they didn’t have the attackers did not have access to the Chef Anne Foundation computing resources, which is, which is great, um but you these these attackers, they don’t. Needed a lot of the times they can they can socially engineer and elicit a lot of this information from the finance staff and the other staff that are out there in the community. I have a panel coming up on the show, uh, yeah, later later today talking about the use of artificial intelligence in in in gathering personally personally identifiable information. So then not not again like to your point, not needing to go into the platform or the resources of the organization. But through artificial intelligence, putting it all together to make an invoice look real or you know whatever it is that they’re whatever they whatever their mechanism is for infiltrating making it look very authentic because it has so much personal data. Yeah right, right. So but that didn’t, that didn’t happen in your case, uh just before the explosion of large language models and BT a little ahead of a little ahead of that, yeah, OK. Oh, you said last year it was sometime last year. OK. Uh, so Steve, uh, all right, so hopefully, uh, folks have, uh, riprap security or another, uh, exemplary. It’s hard to imagine, uh, any other firm being as good as riprap Security, but, but, uh, you have, uh, you found one of the few that are, or you’re using riprap. What do you wanna know? Uh, first call, yeah, yeah, so I mean I, I think the, the first call we, we try to understand what are the timelines, who’s involved, like what are the broad sketches of the story, what’s happened to dates and what what systems are affected? What things are do we suspect that the attacker might have access to and that sort of starts to help us orient who in the organization that we’re working with we should talk to, what systems we should start focusing our forensics and technical experts on. And really start trying to work the problem and understand. I mean, um, a lot of the times our our customers when they have an incident they’re they have limited information they, they know that they had a weird email on a Tuesday and but they’re they’re looking to fill in the gaps, right? This is, this is as much of those kind of classic mysteries, you know, as it’s no longer, it’s not just a, you know, 22 minute like murder mystery on TV. It’s usually many days, but we, we try to sketch out and do that kind of. Investigative work to understand the timeline of that incident. I just thought of another reason why you’d want to have an agency lined up ahead of time for for you obviously need remote access immediately. Now we’ve got, you know, maybe we have to go through a hurdle to get that done. If it’s not lined up in advance, time is of the essence as you said, Danielle. And I, I think trust is a big area too, right? By the time the chef and staff had their incident, we had already spent much, a lot of time with Danielle and with the executive staff and other members that are, you know, doing the more hands-on work. So they knew me. They knew our team, they were comfortable with us. We didn’t have to build that rapport, you know, in a relatively short time. It’s just, it’s just a lot better and in the midst of a crisis in the midst of a crisis, right? I don’t know if I can trust these people, but he said something weird, but I don’t have time to worry about it, right? So I have a flag, but I can’t wave it. No. All that is resolved if you, I’ve already hopefully encouraged folks to have a relationship in advance. You know who you’re gonna call. OK, OK, um. All right, next step. I don’t know, Steve, you want to lead us through. All right, so you’ve gotten your preliminary information. Do you need the client to do something or what’s next? Yeah, yeah, so something we covered in the talk is how, how can you how can you best use the organization’s existing capabilities, tools and talents to help you with the incident. So we often talk a lot about engaging the communications and the marketing staff because they they know they already have a way that they communicate with their with their donors with their stakeholders with the with the the beneficiaries of the of the organization and by using their expertise you can craft really really clear transparent timely uh communications to the people that might be affected with the incident. We, we see that’s interesting so you’re you’re the guy you’re the you’re the tech guy, but you’re concerned about the, the outward communication. Absolutely, because I mean what what’s a nonprofit without a lot of trust, right? And, and we, we see a lot of examples in the tech industry in broader business world and nonprofits that. Organizations that have incidents that aren’t transparent about it that aren’t sharing the whole story they’re not being timely about sharing the information the trust in their reputation is severely damaged and so they get less interest they have you know if they’re a company they they lose a lot of customers um and. The instant response process is about trying to maintain that trust and that reputation and reduce the impact of the incident. Danielle, so what’s going on at the Chef Ann Foundation now in the 24 hours since you’ve called Steve, what’s happening. So Steve is doing, Steve and his team are doing all the investigative work of like, OK, what has truly gone wrong? Like what do we need to find what’s out there? What’s the scope of this because often it feels just like the tip of an icebergs are they. In the system, you know, um, and so he’s handling a lot of that also communicating to my team. My role at the time was to communicate to our internal team because I know Steve. I’ve been on a call with Steve every week for 3 months, but they may not know Steve as well, and now my board wants answers. So my role turned into very much that internal communication network of like, OK. C-suite, here’s what’s going on on the edge of the cliff. I know, I know the ending was I already know the ending, but I’m still intrigued by the by the time by the unfolding. Yeah, because everyone’s everyone’s concerned, everyone’s just here to do their job to make the world a better place. That’s what we’re here for. We’re not here to build like a Fort Knox system, so when something goes wrong, it’s like, oh no, have we been too focused on. The healthy meals for kids, it’s chef Anne for sake, it’s not we make lovely food. It’s not, uh, you know, it’s, it’s not nuclear nuclear arms negotiations. Does someone have a vendetta against whole grains? I don’t know. I really like quinoa, you know just not agree with my stomach. And I’m lashing out. She had a recipe on she had a quinoa pudding recipe on the website just last week and I was very annoyed. So let’s go ahead and, yeah, exactly. So it’s, it’s, it’s a big sea change for the organization, um, especially the teams that you work regularly with to shift and say, oh no, this is actually now a current crisis and something we have to worry about that presentation next week is no longer my priority. And so it’s often a lot of soothing the internal team and also trying to communicate in the easiest method possible to the internal team like they don’t care that it was a business email compromise with uh like an MFA concern like they don’t want to know all of that they just wanna know we’re safe, we’re OK, we’re working on it, keep doing your job, we’ll let you know when we need something from you. And same with the board. The board just wants to know we’ve got it covered, so it was a very easy thing to be able to call my CEO and say hey this is what’s going on. I have this update. I’m gonna send this to the board. I just want you in the loop. You can send it to the board. I don’t really care how this process works. I just need to communicate what I have, um, and so it really became more of a like a switchboard operator of trying to keep the organization. Calm and steady and on the right path while rip rap was able to like resolve and actually investigate a lot of these technical pieces. And how about with your uh your marketing communications team that Steve mentioned were you were you talking to them or did Steve talk to them directly or what we loop them in um Steve’s recommendation. Uh, we were very fortunate that we didn’t have a public, uh, kind of incident. Um, it was very internal, so we, we loop them in just in case there was a larger impact that we needed to involve them on, but, um, they were, they were ready they were right on board. I mean the marketing teams can spend on a dime, so they were prepped, they were ready they had some language already written up by the end of the first day just in case. So it was really a coordination between all of the parties in the first 24 hours you’re not sure what Steve’s. All I know is that all of my meetings have been canceled and my CEO was trying to buy me pizza and my husband was bringing me coffee and I was like, alright, we’re we’re in it now, you know, um, you’re still in the eye of the storm. Um, all right, what, uh, Steve, lead us to the timeline. So we’re outside the 24 hours now. You, you know more. What, what, what have you, what did you, were you, yeah, what are you able to uncover in the 1st 24 hours? Yeah, so it’s, it’s a lot of um timeline information, right? When is the, when is the email sent? When is it opened? How many people receive it? How many people looked at it in the organization, um, what can we learn about the the information that you don’t get to see in the body of the email but that’s attached to it so information about the email itself when it was sent who sent it doing that kind of deep forensics work to understand can we track down who was responsible for it. Um, and can we, can we report them right, and, and try to shut down the fraud. That’s good. All right, let’s keep that open. There’s a mystery that I don’t know the answer to, um, but there is, there’s a ton of email sometimes you see it when, uh, an email is undeliverable, then you see all this string of, I don’t know if it’s called metadata or accompanying like emails fly all over the world instantaneously and, and sometimes you see this. This is just to me it’s just meaningless characters, but you can decipher a lot of information about an individual message. Exactly, yeah, so we we get a lot of information about how the email traveled across the internet from where it was sent, the computer that it was sent to where it was received. Uh, we can understand if the person sending the email uh is trying to hide their the the true email address of the um the person that sent it. Um, and we, we can use it to uncover all of these indicators that yes, it is a malicious email because a normal person isn’t sending an email with all these weird kind of factors in this metadata that you see. And so it it is um it is a lot, it is possible to. Um, understand a lot more by looking at this metadata and then to use that to pivot the investigation to say have we ever seen the same person try to attempt the same thing against the organization or other organizations that might be in the chef An network right partner organizations, um, you know, beneficiary organizations to say let’s just make sure that. Um, the attacker, if they really do hate quinoa that they’re not going into the quinoa Association and trying the same attack on them and so we, we look for these opportunities to say, hey, how can we help other people in the network or how can we make sure that other people in the network aren’t affected because we know nonprofits are so highly connected. Oh wow I’m I’m impressed by your uh. Holistic thinking like the marketing communications team, get them involved. I wouldn’t have expected the IT forensics, you know, expert to suggest get marketing involved and same thing with, you know, other agencies that we don’t even work with, you know, but can we support the network or at least, you know, inform the network about potential, should we? I’m impressed by your holistic approach we try because I think. So much of the risk is from third parties, right? It’s not always your organization that’s gonna get attacked. It’s maybe your vendor that gets attacked and that they the the attacker is able to gain access to that vendor’s email system and then the attacker is sending invoices from a legitimate vendor’s email address to you to try to get you to send money to a new bank account, right? That’s a very common thing we see. So it’s not even, you know, the chef and foundation can do everything right 100% of the time with security. But if their partner organizations aren’t doing the same thing, they’re they’re still potentially at risk for getting these, these kind of attacks. All right, take us through the timeline now. We’re beyond 24 hours. What’s unfolding? Sure, so we, we think we, we really understood after that 24 hour period that the incident was really limited, that there was, there was the funds were stopped. That’s, you know, of course the main thing. There was no access from the attacker into the organization. Danielle, what was the? I think they timed it perfectly. It was like 49,000. It was just under the cusp of that 50,000 where a lot of organizations want to review. OK, maybe require more signatures or or additional review. 9 999 car dealership. OK, I’m sorry, that’s OK. Yeah, so I think knowing being able to communicate that there that while there was the email that got sent, there wasn’t a true incident in that no money exchanged hands. There was no um breaching of chefan accounts or computer systems. And then being able to communicate that it just sort of brings down the stress level of everyone and says, OK, like this is, it was, it was an event, right? It’s not an incident because there’s no real impact because there’s no money changed hands. It’s very limited scope you can reassure the board, CEO, yeah, my accountant can stop hyper hyperventilating, uh, you know, like so everybody can just kind of calm a little bit and and we start, we start turning. We start moving towards closing out the incident, but and but it’s, it’s and this is where we say we like to use the phrase like never waste an incident. Right, never, never waste the opportunity to learn from what happened in the incident and make changes based of it. We see a lot of organizations that have these lesson learned sessions afterwards. Oh, we did this well, we didn’t do this well, but what we see the gap is nobody is assigned specific action items with due dates of things like, hey, we want you to go and turn on this technology or for any invoice over $5000 it needs to have a second set of eyes on it. And so taking these learnings and applying them to the organization and working it into the workflows, not just the IT and the technology side, but the finance side and the and the communication side just so that you’re more prepared next time and you’re you’re. You’re, you’re building some muscle memory for the Danielle, so in the session, uh, what did you see what shortcomings did you see that folks, you know, in their in their tabletop exercises were not, you know. Yeah, it was really interesting um so the way we structured the session was the 1st 20 minutes were like a quick. Slide show presentation of here’s what you need to know. He’s kind of the stuff that’s gonna come at you and then the incident that the exercise began and um it was really interesting because they wanted more information oftentimes they’re like, OK, so somebody sent you know somebody sent a bad invoice now what? and I was like, yeah, now what. You get to figure that out and they’re like, no, but the page is only like, yeah, that’s part of it like you only get like 3 touch points of information to lead your way into this process um and it was really interesting to see how that clicked on and they were like, oh this is this is like just like it would be, um, and they started asking the questions of like, well, could we do this? Could we do that? How, how did you handle this, Danielle and I was like yeah yeah. You’re gonna have Danielle’s expertise. Daniel’s wisdom from born from born of experience when you have your crisis. Right, right. I mean we do want to give them a little, a little nudge here and there, but there are no wrong answers, just trying to learn the process and I think the other thing was a lot of them saw um how stressful it can be um even in a purely hypothetical. You’re at a table with 5 strangers at a conference rolling a dice, you know, it’s still stressful, right, there’s this is, this is purely hypothetical, but still imagining your organization going through something like that or making it real of like who would I call? What would I say to the CEO who who’s the marketing head? Um, was a really good way for them to kind of envision and realize, oh this is just, this is at the lowest possible stake level, which means when this happens, if this happens, this is going to be so much more stressful and we really need a plan. Um, all right, so I don’t know who I should ask to, uh. Uh, we opened with you, Danielle, so I’ll give Steve the opportunity to bring closure to, uh, to our incident. Uh, what, what, who is it from? What were we able to find out? We were there any we able to point the finger at a person or an agency or a company or a country or and, and what, what was the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so often times these things are the the sort of uh the the end of the story, sort of the the final uh solving of the mystery is is kind of anticlimactic. I I know I wish I could point to, oh yeah, that guy Paul in Saint Louis, like he was the guy that sent it. You often can’t get that level of information. Um, but we’re, we were able to understand, hey, these are the computers that send these emails we’re able to disclose them to entities like the FBI just to make it part of their larger cybercrime tracking domestic it was from inside the US it was from inside the US, um, and then what we, what we really spent a lot of time on is, hey, is the plan that we’ve made for cybersecurity in the road map we’ve worked on with Danielle and her team, what changes do we need to make? Uh, to that plan of how we’re gonna improve how we’re gonna work together to improve cybersecurity based on what we learned from the incident. There are certain projects that we, we pulled up, may may happen sooner, some we delayed, um, and it really, it really. Led to a situation where we’re just constantly able to update the, the strategy for the Chef Anne Foundation to say, hey, we have this thing we learned a lot from it and here’s how we’re gonna apply that in all the work that we do, uh, going forward. Danielle, I guess, uh, kind of epilogue, what made you contract with riprap three months in advance? What obviously not knowing what was coming. Well, what, what was the impetus for putting a relationship in place? Yeah, actually a little bit of a full full circle, um. I had attended the uh nonprofit tech conference in Denver and that’s where I met Riprap um at their presentation was just 2 years ago that was 2 years ago yeah and so um started working with them after that and I really really enjoyed our partnership. They completed a full road map assessment and so it’s um it’s pretty fun that we met at an NTC and now we’re presenting about this at an NTC. That’s great. I got chills synes. I got I got chills um so that’s. Good. The the epilogue is is excellent. All right, even if the, the outcome, so, uh, just going, Steve, going back to the uh what you were able to pinpoint like could you get to a county or a state? We have a rough like right we we get rough information, right? You get like, you know, rough geography here’s the the town or the city that they’re kind of by was, you know, I think Washington state based somewhere in in the Seattle area, but from there it’s a little hard to to to pinpoint beyond that. You have to really be law enforcement. or you know some spy agency that you can’t glean from from our side or while they’re doing all this incredible investigative work, you know, I’m trying to keep my people calm, having that final report to my board, to my C-suite to say, hey, here’s what we learned, here’s what we’re doing, here’s how we’ve processed this was really, really tremendously helpful. It gained a huge amount of trust from the board that our organization was taking this seriously and that we were prepared. Um, and we’ve gotten so many kudos from them on that incident, so it was, it was truly a learning opportunity that we were able to grow into something more. Yeah, and I appreciate the trust building too that they know that you’re on top of, well, you are the senior senior director of technology that they know technology is secure. It’s something that, you know, maybe you’ll report once a year or something, you know, but they don’t have to be concerned about as a board or even the CEO, you know, all right. Outstanding. It’s a good story. It’s a good story. It’s a good story with a good ending. Yeah, yeah, I’m glad we got the epilogue out. That was very good. Uh, they are Steve Scherer, CEO and co-founder of Riprap Security, and Danielle Eller, senior director of technology at the Chef and Foundation. Steve and Danielle, thanks. Thanks very much for sharing that story. Thanks for having us. Good to see you again. Thank you so much. Thank you and thank you for being with nonprofit Radio’s coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. Self-care. We just had the long holiday weekend, 4th of July. I hope you took care of yourself as well as family or friend obligations. Hope you’re taking care of yourself this summer with time. With the sort of chaos that’s uh emerged from the, the budget bill that passed and it’s bad impacts in a lot of areas including Our community. I it’s just so important for you to be thinking about yourself. It’s not selfish to do self-care. That is not selfish. That’s the best way. For you to care for others. You have to take care of yourself first on an airplane, you put your oxygen mask on first, then you help them, then you help the children who are with you, right? You put your mask on first. You gotta take care of yourself first, then you can be your best person bringing your best self to taking care of others, helping others, even working, just working with others. So please, uh, several weeks ago, I reminded you about your meds from Mico Marquette Whitlock, taking care of mindset, exercise, diet, and sleep, the meds. And I would also refer you to an episode from March, March 31st. It was with Jennifer Walter, the social worker. That episode was Mental Wellness Among the chaos, March 31st. Please Take care of yourself this summer. It’s essential. That’s Tony’s take too. Kate Though I was gonna miss my cue, didn’t. You thought I was gonna miss my cue again. You set you up I set you up. People can’t see obviously as when we, when we speak as a podcast, but Uncle Tony kind of, he leaned in and then like took it back and then he went for it. Yeah, set you up. led you in, led you in thinking, oh my God, 2 weeks in a row, he’s gonna miss his cue or miss the queue, miss my cue, I should say. Well, at least you’re not forgetting my name. Yes, right, we’re improving. It’s, it’s an upward slope. Things are getting better. I remembered your name this week. We’ve got Beu but loads more time. Now it’s time for smart data storage. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference at the Baltimore Convention Center. We’re sponsored here by Heller Consulting. Our topic right now is data disasters, smart storage for nonprofits. Bringing that to us are, uh, Brian Cavanaugh, director of digital at the Vilcek Foundation, and Tiffany Nilikova, the information specialist at Services in Action. Welcome, Brian, welcome Tiffany. Thank you for having us. Thank you pleasure, pleasure. Um, let’s start with an overview. Uh, why don’t we start with you, uh, Brian, just as we have plenty of time together, but if you could just give, uh, an overview of the Amy, he’s gonna do an overview of his session and, uh, what, uh, why, why you, you all believe this is important for, uh, for our, for our nonprofit community. Well, we’re using data disasters that nonprofits face, uh, the hardware failures, natural disasters, uh, staff turnover, funding cuts, etc. uh, as ways to talk about data resilience and how data resilience can make organizations information more smart, secure and accessible, uh, to deliver programs, uh, and mission critical work. OK, now you did not put data resilience in your session topic. Maybe that was, uh, maybe I was gonna turn people off like data resilience. Oh my God, I can’t imagine anything duller than the data disaster. Now we’ve got, now we’ve got an alliteration. We’ve got disasters, we’ve got crisis like there’s tornadoes whirling around us. There’s a sense of urgency, yeah, right, um. uh, but you, Tiffany, please, uh, why don’t you define data resilience for us? Data resilience is about taking care of your data in a way that protects the organization’s, uh, integrity. It’s uh. Data resilience is about um building a structure where you can rely on it we talked about how you can manage your information in a way that it’s faster it’s quicker you can respond to things a lot better when you manage your data and the resilience of it. Um, so I imagine there are some things that we’re not doing quite right about, uh, data, data management, and you specifically say data storage. Uh, I think we want to talk about, uh, cloud versus uh local. Why don’t you keep going for the time being, Tiffany, um, lead us into like some, some of the pitfall. What, what’s some things we should be doing smarter? So like you said, there are local storage solutions and their cloud-based storage solutions, and they offer a lot of pros and. Cons and it really depends on what you’re looking for. So with the cloud obviously you can work collaborative collaboratively with your colleagues you can access your data from anywhere. It’s a very robust system it can grow with your organization the fees are fairly low, uh, but you do have the risk of unauthorized access. uh, you know there are cyber threats that are much more real. Um, also you have authorized access so one of the things that we were discussing is when you click I agree, what are you exactly agreeing to? That nobody reads all that, right? I mean there’s 19 pages scroll to the bottom to say I agree. Absolutely sometimes I think it’s a game to see how fast, well, you know, no I don’t, not every time but before this session I specifically do sometimes, but you know what, this is a great way to use chat uh use AI Chat GPT can read it for you now and you can ask the chat GPT questions. What do I care about? What stands out for me? How does this compare against other companies? Uh, and one of the things that I care a lot about is the authorized access. So when I click I agree, I’m giving, let’s say Google Drive access to my data. They scan it for their own compliance with uh policies, but also, um, they might use it in their marketing. How do I feel about that? Is my community vulnerable or are they up against discrimination possibly? So what are my responsibilities with that and when, when I expose my data. I’m exposing a lot of people, so your local solutions are, you know, uh, external hard drive or network attached storage or a solid state drive, uh, external hard drives, there’s all sorts of ways that you can move your data from when you’re working on it to storing it that doesn’t involve the Internet. So the pitfalls of that are you can’t just access it from everywhere. You don’t work collaboratively, so you might end up with tons of drafts of the same document. Uh, but you also have much more control because it remains within a physical space. Uh, you are, it is, um, vulnerable to attacks to, uh, sorry to inadvertent loss or to, um, to, you know, damage it can be, you know, fire, fire damage we talked about, uh, just going kind of extinct some, you know, like floppy disks where are they? No’s using those anymore, you know, so that can happen in the future. So like I said, there’s pros and cons to both. Um, what else in terms of, uh, pitfalls, what, what else, Brian, could we be doing smarter besides uh storage? Uh, well, we need to think about antigrated file types. Uh, so we’re talking about the WordPerfects and the quark files and the floppy disks and all the type of data that may not be as accessible as it once was. And so we need to think about futureproofing that data by using recommended and preferred file types. Um, which is something that that the Library of Congress does very well, uh, by researching and publishing, uh, those recommended file formats in a statement, um, and so you can, you know, think about your data, uh, as a long term investment. Um, by using those recommended file types so that you can have access, you know, long into the future. What are the preferred formats? Are you able to name the top two or three? Sure, so for digital text-based formats, um, you’re gonna look at PDF, uh, PDFA, uh, for digital images, you’re gonna be looking at TIFS primarily, uh, JPEG 2000s, um, and for video you’re looking at IMF. What is um what is PDFA? What does that mean? There are different types of uh coding uh in in the PDF, uh, and oftentimes if you’re using a solution like Acrobat or some of the other free tools, um, you can save the PDF in in multiple different formats and they go back into the early 2000s. Uh, it’s just different layers of uh options and features and functionality. Um, that are built in and every year they advance, um, so the most, you know, the most common has, you know, a wider set of features um than it once did. OK, so there are preferred formats for files and why, why is this? Oh, just so they don’t get out outdated for one. OK, yeah, exactly, yeah, otherwise. You’re stuck, um, you know, using an emulator or a very old machine that may not be secure in the first place to try to open up, you know, some type of file that you haven’t needed or wanted access to for, you know, 15 years, but now you need it and you can’t can’t open it. Yeah, OK, or you’ve got some legacy machine to do it and has its own vulnerabilities, right? OK. I could be a data data storage scientist, aren’t you? That’s not true at all, um. Uh, searchable so we need to be able to get our data, right, Tiffany, let’s talk about accessing the data. I mean, yeah, let’s talk about you gotta get the data out. You gotta be able to find your data so you have to be able to to categorize it and label it in ways that make sense to you. I mean we can get deep into a database structure system, but I’m gonna talk a little bit more about just the files that people use every day. Uh, you know, how do you know that the file you’re looking for is the most recent version, or, uh, you know, let’s say you have an opportunity to write a grant application, but it’s due at 5 o’clock and you know you’ve written a document before that would apply to this. Where is it? So that’s when what you label your document is particularly important. I used to label documents, Tony. I used to label them by the mood of my day and I never could find things again and that is a terrible way to name documents. There’s a lot of swear words in it, but and so it’s cathartic, but it’s not very helpful when you’re looking for things. So the analogy to that is having on your desktop. Oh my goodness, I sometimes I go and I see someone’s desktop. I think my heart rate starts increasing. Yeah, I feel how can you like the desktop is just loaded with folders and files. I feel that way when I see an inbox with like thousands of unread messages. Yeah, you learned you’ve you’ve come to the bright side now from your, from your archaic dark dark days of file naming. So there now there’s two ways of doing things now you might surprise you, but I’m a bit type A, so I prefer a deep hierarchy where you have things, you know, in general, and they get narrow and narrow and narrow and it’s really important when you label a document that it doesn’t duplicate any of the naming. Sure that you’ve used in the folders before that so you don’t have to repeat the year again and again and again um some people prefer to leave everything on like a flat surface on their desktop and then use their search that’s one way not my preferred method so what I’m gonna say when you’re labeling things you use descriptors that everybody agrees on is it a letter or is it um a document or is it communication you have to agree on the terms you’re using as a group. It’s got to go deeper than that. That that’s just, that sounds like a very basic policy place to start. By the way, I love the hierarchy. I mean, I’m very hierarchical thinking you look, uh, look, I use Apple, uh, laptops and, you know, I don’t repeat. I I don’t say that client name, you know, contract. I just say contract because it’s in the file for legal for the. For that, for that client, which is in clients current, exactly not clients historical, that’s a different. I move them from clients current to I hardly ever have any clients leave, of course, not so much client current file is loaded clients historical is is infinitely small. It’s like 2 now there are 2. I mean, I’ve been in business for 28 years, so I haven’t, you know, a couple have just ended, uh, very amicable, but now so anyway. The hierarchy, very, I, I just, I, but that’s the way I think. But suppose somebody doesn’t think that way. That’s not you suppose the organization thinks that way, but you don’t personally. You gotta be dragged along, right? You do. So when you use descriptive words, people who prefer to search and leave everything flat now know the terms in which to search. Things have changed over the years because now. We have AI embedded into our own databases so for example if you use Google Drive, Gemini is within there. Now the policy say because I read them, uh, that it doesn’t share your database with its own it doesn’t teach it’s own AI based on your data, but who’s to say that’s gonna change so you can search now within Gemini of your own database to find things so your naming structures a little less particular. But I’m still gonna say the more descriptive you can be, the more you can match both those type A and type B people. OK, OK, um. What else? So this has to be a written, written policy in terms of file naming. Now what about folder naming? How is that different than file naming or is basically the same regimen? Yeah, I would say the same thing same with what you just described like legal contract. I would say it’s the same thing. Yeah, OK, so hierarchical is preferred we’re not using the Dewey decimal system. OK. Oh, I love the DDS. Oh, the DDS. I never heard I gee I didn’t you go to the library you have a degree in library, it’s like, yes, I did library. Does anybody still use the library still use Dewey Decimal or that that that. The spine of the books suggested they have card catalogs in libraries? No, no, no, I haven’t seen in ages ages. Thank you very much, Tiffany. OK, um, we should talk maybe about cost, cost, uh, let’s go to you, Brian. Uh, I mean, we spend a lot. I guess we can get the ultimate in security and storage and cutting edge, but we got to spend a lot, right? Where do we find our balance? Yeah, and the reality is that a lot of nonprofits don’t have the budgets to spend a whole lot. Um, the good thing is that, you know, a lot of the solutions that we’re looking at in the session um are low cost and and free. Um, you know, a lot of the solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox, Box, etc. um, they provide discounts to nonprofits, uh, free and low cost solutions, um, but to your point, uh, the more features and security that you’re looking for data loss prevention, data classification tools, they may be at a higher tier and so you may have to, you know, be paying for uh some additional things like that, um. That said though, um, you know, you need to be considering your backup solutions and other types of costs as as a holistic view of your organization’s data practices and security and so it may not just be enough to consider the cost for storage, but you also need to consider the cost of your backup and other policies and tools that your governance policy dictates. Let’s talk about doing some sample retrievals, right, so let’s say we use the cloud. I think most, most nonprofits probably use the cloud now. I mean, is it? Yeah 100%. There are some people who have local storage, I guess, but let’s let’s go with a cloud-based example. Should you be testing your, your retrieval every once in a while, make sure this, this structure is working like I’m trying to find this, maybe I know exactly what I’m looking for, but I’m gonna try to find it without going right to it. Yes, uh, yeah, OK, absolutely. Like any policy, uh, or protocol that the nonprofit has in place, you need to be testing it regularly. Um, so that includes going into your storage, uh, platform solution, um, finding and retrieving things, downloading them, um, and you know some advanced tools will do data verification checksums for you, um, but more often than not, um, just having that one on one experience of finding something, retrieving it, understanding what your users will be going through. Um, and simulating that action for them to understand, are there any pitfalls, are there any difficulties in doing this, and also just making sure the data is valid, um, that the file is working, it’s not corrupt, um, and, uh, that, you know, it will set your users up for success. Uh, we have jargon jail on the nonprofit radio. You mentioned, uh, data verification and checksums. You need to flesh that out to get yourself on probation parole, parole. You’re already in jail. Uh, so, uh, when, when you’re validating data, uh, you’re looking at, you know, things like file size, um, all the different types of metadata that are embedded within that file. Um, and some solutions will check over time, uh, if they have changed, um, and if there’s something that goes awry. Uh, you know, a check some verification or data valification can send up a red flag and and alert someone. OK, so it’s a way of verifying data integrity that happens automatically. It can, yeah, OK, OK. um, Tiffany, you asked a rhetorical question earlier about making sure, how do you know whether you have the most recent version of a file. Uh, right, we’re in the cloud. I see, or some, some, somebody did not or some, let’s just one person, uh, 11. Scofflaw, the word I was looking for. One scofflaw did not follow the policy. And now we’ve got, I see multiple versions. I see multiple files with the exact same file name. What do I do? I used to work with this guy. Oh my goodness, he was such a treat. He had, he was, oh, he was, but he was the boss was he was actually a felon, not just a scofflaw, and to me a scofflaw is like turnstile jump right but this guy sounds like a felon. Yeah, somewhere in there he had master document. I was looking for something. I was helping him organize his uh information management system, and I found what I what what was called the master file. And I thought well that’s gotta be it, right? That’s gotta be it. And then I found Master File too. And then master file 3 and then master file 4 and I don’t know the end number so I don’t know how many master files I’m looking for so that was like that was a whole day of like finding all the master files I could when you, when you have that you have to well, ensure that the last one is the best one and then delete just delete them, get rid of them, move them off maybe you want to store them in a secret spot from the scuff law so he doesn’t keep make I’m referring to him you know because this guy’s in my mind. Um, but you, you know, maybe move them to the side for a little while, yeah, in the archive, your secret one, so it’s not lost forever, but it can’t be part of your system because it’s just gonna clutter it. uh, I’m a big fan when you’re working on a project, have like the whole story complete when you’re done, put everything in one file and it’s all complete and it’s all there and you know where it is and you don’t have those extra drafts because they’re gonna get confusing even if it’s just. Copy and paste or cut and paste put it all into one thing and then follow the naming convention exactly and then you always know where it is and then you have your cultural posterity. Like your your cultural, your organization’s culture, you’ve got your, um, but, you know, do I need this file name can I just use keyword searches? I know the I know the word that’s in there, at least I, I believe I do until my search is unsuccessful. I’m screwed. Mhm. Yeah, we have to accommodate them don’t we? We do we do because we expect them to get up and running right away and if you know if they come in and there’s all these names that don’t mean anything, they’re not going to be able to do that not gonna be able to find things and they’re gonna start doing things from the very beginning, writing that grant proposal from the very beginning, yeah, and they don’t, you know. They’re just redoing work and it’s just a waste of time and energy. Logarithmic, uh, file, file creation, right? I mean, I guess it just plateau eventually, but it could be, it could go crazy with new, a couple of new employees recreating everything and now we’ve got duplicate files and and half of them aren’t named right and you’ve lost your donors. you’ve lost your volunteers along the way. See, this is all motivation maybe we should talk about this. Well, you have a lackluster host, not scofflaw, but lackluster, um, you know, we should talk about in the beginning, but these folks have been with us for 19 minutes, so hopefully they’re seeing now why these things are important. You have to pay attention to data integrity, data management, right, um. What haven’t we talked about user friendliness. There’s something else from your, from your session, uh, description, user friendliness. We’ve got these policies, but, uh, people don’t, you know, they’re not adhering because they’re too technical or something, you know, again, balancing, right? Brian, uh, balancing Brian, what, you know, what are we gonna do? Uh, we now we got trouble, people are not using them, uh. You need to be able to show why there’s value in doing things like file naming conventions, folder name conventions, um, so to your point about, you know, using keyword searching it works until it doesn’t work, uh, and so show people the value, uh, in, you know, adhering to the policies, um, and working through a lot of the steps that may feel like extra work to be honest, um. And then once you demonstrate that value, it begins to sink in that you can then take it to the next step, provide more training and resources and education. Um, it might take a crisis to make the point. It it might because we have the grant deadline that you hypothesized before and, uh, Tiffany, and we don’t have it. We haven’t found it. We blew the deadline. That’s a disaster. That’s disasters. All right, now we all learned a lesson. OK, sorry. It’s OK, um, uh, or you know, let’s say someone accidentally deleted a file or misplaced it or overwritten it, it’s, it’s gone. Um, and that keyword search no longer works because you’re trying to recover something that’s based on either a piece of metadata or a file name, um, and so, you know, in that instance, uh, you may not be able to recover that data and you know it’s lost and it impacts someone’s job. Yeah. All right. Uh, we can wrap up. Let’s see, uh, who opened? Tiffany, did you open? I think I did. Let’s give Brian a chance to close. Leave us some with some, uh, not motivation, we just did motivation. We just spent 10 minutes on motivation, but, uh, some promising words. Yeah, some promise for our for our future. Let’s look forward to a bright future with no data disasters. Bring us, bring us to this nirvana. Thank you. Uh, let me recognize, uh, Mark Topher, uh, the Vilcek Foundation’s archivist, uh, who, who’s not joining us here today, but, but joined us for the session here at NTC, um, and to, to his point and to in using his words, you know, consistency is key. Uh, and so making sure that everyone in the organization is on board, um, they’re using the best practices, um, and they’re making sure that they’re taking proactive steps to make sure the information that they are, um, good stewards of, um, is smart and secure and in doing so, um, we’re going to be protecting, um, the, the people that matter most to our organizations because at the end of the day. Um, we’re here to serve people and um all those people, whether they are in vulnerable, um, populations, um, or you know just in tricky situations these days, um, that’s what matters most and we want to be good stewards of data um and and make sure that you know nothing bad happens um to those communities. That’s Brian Cavanaugh, director of digital at the Vilcheck Foundation. With Brian is Tiffany Nicklichkova, information specialist at Services in Action. All right, Brian, Tiffany, thank you very much for sharing. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting. Next week, our 25 NTC coverage continues with your intergenerational people pipeline. If you missed any part of this week’s show. I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stone. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for May 27, 2024: Strategic Meetings For Teams Of One & Cyber Incident Cases And Takeaways

 

Janice Chan: Strategic Meetings For Teams Of One

As our 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage continues, Janice Chan returns with the savvy idea of adapting team meeting principles to a team of just one. She’ll have you thinking of yourself as a team leader, rather than one person doing everything. Janice is at Shift and Scaffold.

 

Steve Sharer: Cyber Incident Cases And Takeaways

We’ve got good stories about bad actors. You’ll also hear the practical steps your nonprofit can take to prepare for cybersecurity incidents to reduce their impact. And we’ll empower you to hold incident prep discussions with your leadership or staff. Steve Sharer, who says “Security is a team sport,” joins from RipRap Security. This is also from 24NTC.

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of formation if you made my skin crawl with the idea that you missed this week’s show. And if you think I said fornication, get your head out of the gutter, close the porn hub window. It’s formation. Here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce this week’s show. Hey, Tony, we have strategic meetings for teams of one as our 2024 nonprofit technology conference coverage continues. Janice Chan returns with the savvy idea of adapting team meeting principles to a team of just one. She’ll have you thinking of yourself as a team leader rather than one person doing everything Janice is at shift and scaffold and cyber incident cases and takeaways. We’ve got good stories about bad actors. You’ll also hear the practical steps your nonprofit can take to prepare for cybersecurity incidents to reduce their impact and will empower you to hold incident prep discussions with your leadership or staff, Steve S who says security is a team sport joints from riprap security. This is also from 24 NTC on Tony’s take two delightful nostalgic women’s names. We’re sponsored by virtuous. Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking support, generosity, donor box fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org here is strategic meetings for teams of one. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the third day of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all together in Portland, Oregon. Nonprofit radio coverage of the conference is sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me for this conversation, a uh an NTC perennial for nonprofit radio, Janice Chan, you knew she was coming. She’s Director of Shift and Scaffold Janice. Welcome back to nonprofit radio. After many NTC appearances. Many thanks for having me back, Tony. Always good to see you and talk with you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure as well for me to be here in person with you. Not just on Zoom. Yes. Yes. Uh This year your session topic is strategic team meetings for teams of one. All right. All right. Before we get into that, I, I wanna, I wanna talk a little about, I knew that I remembered I was reminded that you were studying Japanese. I, I, when I read it, I had remembered from previous years. Now, you live in Japan? Yes, I, I have been studying Japanese because my husband and I were not realized. But we had decided to take this job opportunity for him, which was based in Tokyo. And so we’re like, all right, we should start trying to learn the language. So, you know, it would be helpful to live there if we’re going to live there. And so, yeah, so we moved about a year and a half ago in 2022 some delays due to the pandemic. Um but it’s been great so far. And yeah, working at learning the language at the place that I live in, I’m sure living there helps quite a bit. You’re immersed. Uh is, is, is English very common or not, not so much, you can definitely get around Tokyo in English outside of Tokyo a bit harder. Um I think they did a lot of things to prepare for the Olympics when they were supposed to be there in 2022. And you know, in terms of the train signage and things like that. So you can get, you can get by in the city, in the city. Actually Japanese people in school, study English for several years. But you know, studying in school is always a little different than talking to native speakers. So I’m having the experience in reverse of going to class and then attempting conversations and often just mangling my way through it. But people are very kind fortunate. You’re, I’m working at it. People appreciate the outreach. They, they’re happy to work with me too, which is nice and really helpful. Do you have Children? Did you bring Children abroad? We brought our cat, our 18 year old grandma cat. She’s lovely and sassy. At 18, she’s still, she’s more sassy now, I think. Well, I know some sassy, 8090 year olds. That’s not surprising. All right. And uh I also want folks to know that if you want to see some beautiful photography, go to uh shift and scaffold.com because you have one stunning one too. There are several but the one of the from the Metropolitan Museum, the Reflection the park is in the background in that room. Yeah. Is that the Egyptian room room? So there are many great photos that shift and scaffold that Janice took there. Alright. So let’s talk about uh team meetings for teams of one. What was the genesis for this uh this uh up the this uh this intuition, this uh creative burst redefinition. That’s what I want resurgence, redefinition, defining redefining one to be a team. So whether even when I’ve been in house and now I’m an independent consultant and so I work for myself. But even when I was in house, a lot of times I was the only person who did the technology, who did the knowledge management, who did the training sometimes. And so I spent basically my entire career mostly being a team of one. Um And, you know, there are certain practices and things that I’ve done over time that I find really helpful in that because sometimes I don’t always have somebody to bounce things off of. Or sometimes when I do, they have a really, they don’t have the same background that I do. Right. So they have a really different perspective which is useful. But sometimes I’m like, I just got to figure things out for myself. There’s nobody setting the strategy. Like my boss is a development director and I’m doing database management, for example, right? So, you know, they’re supportive, but they don’t actually understand my day to day work. And so I need to do a lot of that strategic work by myself. And there were some of these practices I developed over time. And one of them was that I would meet with myself before you have these good practices, which we will absolutely get to. When did you start to think of yourself as a team as a team that emerge? Probably. So I remember, I don’t know why this sticks in my head so much. I had this phone call with this director at my organization at the time and I was supposed to help her team with some and she had a team of like, you know, actual other people. She had about seven people on her team. And I was the grant writer at the time. And so she was like, we have some opportunities. There’s some partners we talked to and, you know, I’d love if we could get your help on applying for these grants, we have the opportunity to apply for these grants in multiple states, but they’re all due at the same time. And she was like, maybe you can get some help from your team. And I was like, listen, I am the team. You were talking to the entire team. I’m the grant rating team. So in addition to my other jobs foisted on you the redefinition, talk to get some support from your team, the rest of myself. So your best practices, these are things you’ve been doing through the years for yourself in your work. So a lot of times often, you know, either at times when I really needed to say plan for the year or I’m about to take on a big project or start something new or I really want to maybe make some changes. Often. I would kind of set aside some time and just sort of be with myself, but I would take notes during that time, right? I would have a little, ok, here’s the thing that I want to work on for this hour or two hours or something, right? I need to plan out 2024 or I need to figure out how to work with that stakeholder who is, you know, I’ve got some stakeholders that I have to manage. And I’m trying to get that on board. I’m kind of trying to come up with some strategies for that. And I’m kind of sitting down and having a little meeting with myself with an agenda because I would be like, wait, what was I supposed to focus on for this hour? Right. And so it’s like a little reminder to myself and I’ve always been a note taker And so it’s just kind of a thing that I kept doing and then I would do it for planning my week. I would do it for reflecting on things at the end of the month and I was talking to someone and I realized that maybe some other people do it, but not everybody thinks of it that way. Um And it was really helpful that I ended up just taking things that I sometimes did in meetings with other people. I was like, oh, you know what, this is really helpful to take notes this way or whatever it is. And then I would do that when I was still doing it just by myself. So that’s kind of where it came out of. What else should we be doing with our team of one. Um So I, so to back it up a little bit part of, I didn’t really think a lot about the practice of meeting with yourself in that I didn’t necessarily articulate it. I was just like, oh, this is what you do. Right. You had a to do list. I certainly had a, to do list, but you didn’t think of devoted time to specific tasks. Well, I did but I think I didn’t think of it as maybe a thing that other people didn’t think of. And I was so, I also like to do creative writing. I was at this conference last year for creative writing and I talked to someone and they were like, so I told my new manager that I don’t start work before 10. She works from 10 to 7, but I don’t start work before 10 because the first two hours of my morning are dedicated for writing. That’s my writing time. And I realized so I live in Japan and I work with clients in the US. And so sometimes I wake up really early for meetings. I have meetings at like six in the morning, sometimes five in the morning. But on days when I don’t have super early meetings, I’d still wake up, my body just wakes up at that time now. But I would just stay in bed, you scroll through my phone or something. Like I wasn’t doing anything at that time. And why would I get out of bed for, for clients or for other commitments? But I wouldn’t do that for myself and for my own work, my own creative writing, et cetera. And I think so I recently, at the end of last year, I was like, all right, I’m going to really make this a regular practice. Um Yeah, and I thought it would be a really interesting session and tool to share with other people at the ante community as well. OK. Um Other, I don’t know, other tactics for you say tactics to make time for strategic work as a team of one, you got to take care of yourself, you got to take care of your team, take care of your team of one. Exactly. So I think a lot of this, so there’s tools and strategies and then there’s the mindset. And so um maybe I’ll talk about the mindset first and then talk show and strategies. But I think sort of as that team of one, a decent host would have asked you about the, you’re suffering a lackluster host. You, you think the host would ask about the mindset and the culture of the team of one first before you get into the, the tactics and strategies. It’s OK. That’s why we’re here to learn. We’re all still learning. And, you know, I think a lot of times where we start, right is when we want to do something better. We’re like, oh what are the tactics we’re doing it better? What’s the technical stuff and not the organizational culture or the mindset, all the internal work that we need to do when we work with people or work with ourselves. And so I think one of the, I don’t remember what started it, but last year I had this epiphany one day of like, wait, who’s leading my team? Like, nobody’s leading my team. Wait, it’s supposed to be me and I’ve not been leading my team and it was a really big sort of flipping the lights of it, John in my head. And I think realizing also whether I’ve been an independent consultant or when I was in house, right. Yes, I could run around and do all of the things and I would do all the things but not necessarily in a, I think I assumed that because I was the same person that it was cohesive and coordinate, right? And it was in a unified direction, you’re only one person, right? So of course, clearly going in the same direction as myself, I would think. And then I realized at one point I was like, I don’t think that’s actually the case and the, and part of that, what does that feel like when you felt like you were not going in a unified direction, I felt really scattered. I felt like, ok, I’m doing these things because it seemed like a good idea at the time or like you’re supposed to post more regularly on social media or you’re supposed to, I don’t know, go out and meet people and network and things like that. But I wasn’t necessarily doing them all in a unified direction. And I realized that I was doing sort of the different job functions like business development and content development and my consulting work and things and, but I wasn’t sort of doing the work to actually unify them intentionally. And so part of that was, I didn’t necessarily think of myself as a team or as a business or as an organization. I just like, I’m just Janice, I’m just showing up and doing the things and, you know, that works, you can get away with that for a time. But I think also, and you see this also in people when they go from being an individual contributor to being a manager or they kind of step from the, I’m just doing the things that my boss told me to do. So now I have to set the direction even if I don’t have any direct reports. And I think really, I realized that it was, I was kind of lacking that direction and I hadn’t made the time or really put into place the practices to do that on a regular basis that I wasn’t leading my own team and that spot was kind of vacant. And I think that’s a really big shift, especially in small organizations where a lot of times you just get thrown into like, hey, we need you to do, you’re like, hired for communications, let’s say, and, and, you know, you’re the only communications person and so you’re doing the writing, you’re doing the graphic design, you’re doing all the digital things. Um And then you’re just, you know, fielding whatever people think is your job honestly, a lot of the time and there’s no, if nobody is trying to make all of that cohesive for, say your external audiences, who’s managing the stakeholders, who is making sure there’s a cohesive strategy, you know, it, it starts, you’re not as effective for your organization. And some of that is, it’s easy to get caught up in all the urgent stuff. But some of it is also just I think that a big part of that mindset shift is we don’t respect ourselves as leaders as teams in the same way that we respect other leaders and teams, right? Like if I saw this meeting with you, Tony, right? There wasn’t a time to show up here, right? There was a process, there’s things going on, you know, I noticed that I would show up to meetings with other people differently versus I will reschedule things on myself all the time. And I’m not going to say that I don’t still do that, right? But I think just being more conscious of like, OK, I’ve pushed aside, pushed aside my time that I set it aside to do the strategic work and I’m putting out fires for other people because they’re urgent, you know, and that happens a lot. But I think the, I think especially in the social impact space, a lot of us, we want to make things better for other people. We care about other people, those requests that other people are making are not unreasonable. But it can also be really hard to, you know, especially for those of us who are taught to put other people first or that we exist for the community, not only for ourselves. Right? And that’s a very common ethos in the nonprofits face as makes sense. And also, you know, depending on who we are, I’m a woman, I’m the daughter of immigrants. And so there are a lot of things that when somebody comes to me and ask me for my help to do something, right? I’m like, oh, let me figure out how I can help you. And it’s easier to keep putting my stuff on the back burner, put myself on the back burner. But then that builds up over time. So if you’re the only, let’s say you’re the entire technology team at your organization, your single team of one, then if you don’t make the time to do the strategic work, your organization is not going to be able to use technology strategically and effectively, you know, your organization is going to be a little bit hamstrung in advancing the mission because you’re not carving that time out and you’re not respecting the time and the energy you need for that. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity, virtuous beliefs that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys. That response to the needs of each individual virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact, virtuous.org. Now back to strategic meetings for teams of one with Janice Chan. I it’s interesting really, the realization that you treat others better than you treat yourself. Essentially, you treat others work more importantly and more respectfully than you treat your own. Like you’re talking about putting off your, putting off your own time, putting off your own tasks. Um Yeah, minimizing your own needs or the other, right? It’s just I’ll get to it. You wouldn’t do that for somebody. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t procrastinate like that you wouldn’t put off the work of others that you might have been asked to do or that, you know, as an individual, as a solo consultant, you realize you need to do, you wouldn’t do that to your clients or to your, to your organization that you’re where you’re a team of one, you wouldn’t do that, but you’ll do it for your own, your own stuff. We need to shift that. This is the mindset that we’re talking about. This is the mindset. And, uh, you know, and some of that I just completely lost my train of thought. That’s, that’s right. I think, well, you made the point and I just was, like, underlining it. So, how about some of the other things that you do besides have, you know, agendas for your, for your solo time? What are some other, some other tips? Yeah. So the, you know, a lot of the things that are about running effective meetings and I know we all have this joke about meetings that should be emails. Um But I think there are times when it’s important to when the meeting is the right tool, when you’re making a decision, you’re trying to get alignment or you’re doing something where dialogue is essential to moving forward with care often, you know, to building relationships um and maintaining trust. And so a lot of the things that are crucial for effective meetings with other people are also useful when you’re by yourself, meeting with yourself, the agenda, taking notes, keeping track of decisions that were made, keeping track of the action items, not just in the notes, but hopefully in whatever project management tool or however you normally keep track of your action items. Um I would say the big difference when you’re meeting with yourself is, of course, there’s not, you know, in a, in most meeting notes, at least the way I take them in a group, I note down who is attending the meeting. Right. There were people we invited to the meeting. We’ve made sure there was somebody from finance and someone from programs and someone from fundraising or whatever. And when you’re meeting with yourself you’re like, oh, yeah, I don’t need to. It’s just Janice. right? Um And something that I find helpful that’s different for a meeting with yourself is to think about the different roles that you need at that meeting because I, so this is a pet peeve. I have of in meetings with other people where they’re like, OK, we finished the agenda for, let’s say the project’s status update or whatever. Actually, this is the same group of people that, you know, for the data working group. So could we just throw that in right now? Right. And then you’re like, I, that’s a total mind shift. Yeah, it’s a total mind shift. I didn’t prepare like I’m not ready. And also, now this was like an hour long meeting that was going to finish faster. And now you’ve just messed with my head because now we’re going to be here for an hour and a half. Right? And so, and I think not part of respecting yourself, right? Is to not do that to yourself either. And so being clear about what is the purpose of this meeting. We use different meeting types for different purposes, right? It’s very different that we’re like a strategic planning meeting and a project planning meeting. And a team general team, weekly meeting should not look and feel the same, you’re not doing the same things. And similarly, when we’re meeting with ourselves, let’s not do that to ourselves either. Um And so naming those roles who needs to be there. So, you know, if I am the communications team and I am the writer and the graphic designer and the digital person and also the uh communications director leading the team, right? Have all of those roles been represented in that time and space. And even if it’s something simpler, like as an independent consultant, right? Is it consultant me? Is it business owner me? You know, or at a more basic level, is it decision maker, me or implementer me? Because if it’s only implementation, that’s just like me writing the report, I’m not making decisions, this is not a meeting, I’m just working on something. So I think calling attention to those um is a key difference that I would say for meetings with yourself. I, I like the idea of different roles because I, I think it helps make you accountable for, for the different, for the different uh areas of responsibility that you have and not only areas of responsibility but individual tasks that you have, you know, the the the business development person is gonna come down on, on the uh the writer who hasn’t done a blog post for six, for six weeks. Right. So III I see an accountability role. Absolutely. I love that. Calling that out anything else? So I think there are a lot of different uh like let’s be real, right? We only have so many hours in the day, but more importantly, we only have so much mental energy and mental capacity for things, right? And so part of that, you know, it’s some tools and tactics for protecting your time. It might be things like no meeting Tuesdays or it might be the last Friday of the month is always dedicated to strategic work. So I think some of it is like making time and actually putting it on your calendar to do that work, right? Um And it’s helpful if your whole organization does it and put it in the calendar, put it in the calendar, this is an important time exactly like you would do for a meeting with three other people. So if you know, sometimes life happens, you need to reschedule, but reschedule it don’t just cross it off the list and then never come back to it. And, you know, there are also other things that, um you know, I think that that time thing is one thing, right? There’s only so many hours, but that’s also a little bit more straightforward in some ways, it’s much harder to protect your mental brain space to do strategic work. So for example, I’m an introvert. I like people. I love hanging out with people at N DC. And also at the end of the conference day, I go back to my hotel room and I’m like, I just need some quiet time for a little bit. But also I know that at the end of the day, I can expect of myself to do strategic work, right? Like maybe I reply to emails or something, but I’m not going back and planning out some major initiative at night because it’s not realistic of where, how tired my brain is. Um And so I think that’s harder because that’s also individual what works for one person isn’t going to work for another person. And so some of that is figuring out what you need to be able to get into that, to have that spaciousness to do the strategic work and to figure out how to ask for that for your team. Um And you know, that could be, it could be things like the no meeting Tuesdays or working from home instead of working in the office. But it could also be things like, you know what I need to go for a walk. I need to actually, when I’m doing this type of work, I need to not be at my regular desk. I need to be in a physically different location so I can get into a different mindset than my day to day, putting out fires, et cetera. Sometimes it might be just like, you know, um, knowing that your team, knowing that, hey, the first hour of my day, every day, that’s like I do not take meetings, right. I’m working, but I do not take meetings so that I can make sure I do the important work, whatever it might be. So it’s really helpful to make sure that you’re asking your boss or your team or your colleagues for that and making that clear. But in doing that, you’re also modeling that for other people as well as you honor yourself and your team. There’s nobody else to advocate for you. You go out and do it. You know, I mean, if you, if you, if that team leader role has been empty, that means there’s no one else that means you need to step into that role. So, you know, I told people in the session, give yourself that promotion already. If you haven’t, how about we leave it right there? That’s perfect. Wonderful. Give yourself that promotion. If you haven’t, she’s Janice Chan director at Shift and Scaffold, Shift and scaffold.com. Always a pleasure. I hope to see you 2025. You think you might come, come back. That’s the I, I’m hoping I will see you all in 2025 Baltimore. My old home city. It’ll be a little closer for you. Five hours closer. All your old home. I used to live in Baltimore. I look forward to seeing you. I know you’ll have a good topic. I don’t have to say, have a good you will. You will you so much to my p Thanks for sharing, Janice and thank you for sharing in our conversation about teams of one where we’re sponsored by Heller consulting, technology implementation and strategy for nonprofits. It’s time for a break. Donor box open up a new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box like kiosk, the smart way to accept cashless donations. Anywhere anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team and member required. Plus your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors, make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your cause. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations. Visit donor box.org to learn more. It’s time for Tony’s take two, Alice Antoinette, Bernice Charlotte, Constance Deidra. Thank you, Kate. These are some of the delightful names that I’ve kept on a personal list for years now of women in their seventies, eighties and nineties. And there’s even one who was 100 years old on the list and I just II I just get nostalgic over names that are so uncommon now. I mean, these are women who were born in the 19 thirties and forties. So not surprisingly, you know, names change, of course. Uh, but yeah, I don’t know, the, the names just move me. Um, and so I’ve been keeping this personal list and I did, I, I posted some of it on linkedin and I thought I would share some of it today. Um, the, you know, it’s, it’s the names and, but it’s also the, the women’s stories, you know, growing up in the 19 thirties, 19 forties, fifties in the United States. Uh, what that was like, you know, education wise for some, some women went on beyond high school. Uh, a lot did not. Some women went on to marry and have families and some did not. So it’s, you know, it’s the combination of the stories and, and I guess the, the richness of the stories makes me love their names as well. Um, and just as I said, you know, get nostalgic for these names that we just don’t see anymore. Like Geraldine Gertrude, Gussie Hazel, Jacqueline Lenoir, Lottie Mabel Marlene Maxine. Many Myrna, Ophelia, Penelope, Rochelle Selma Veronica. All right. I’ve got a lot more on my list, but that’s just a sample of names that I find, uh, delightful and I get nostalgic about them. Have you got any if, uh, if, uh, if you wanna contribute your mom’s name or your grandmother’s name or maybe your own name. Uh, let me know. Love to hear it. Tony at Tony martignetti.com. Let’s see if the names you know, are on my list. That is Tony Stick two, Kate. I would like to add Carmella both with one L and then one with two Ls. Yes. All right. So share why the name Carmela is important to you is I had a great grandmother. You might know better than me. But, but that I’m, you know, my name is my first name is Carmella. Well, I know that, but listeners, listeners could very well not know that your name is Carmela. Kate. Mar uh Carmela and then Kate is, is short which I never understood. I don’t know how Kate is short for Carmella. Carmel. I could see Carmel what? I have an aunt Kate but I have like a grandmother. Caramel, right? So, yeah, but they’re two different, they’re two different women. So how does because Kate is not your middle name? No, it’s not. Anne is my middle name. Like great grandmother Ann or? Right. Where is your great grandmother, Anne? Who was my grandmother? Right? This Carmela was on your other side, on your mom’s side of the family. So I, I didn’t know, I didn’t know Carmella. I don’t know. I’m, I’m happy to call you Kate, although, you know, I often call you Carmela as well because nobody else does. So I like to be different and I think it’s a beautiful name but Kate being short for Carmela, I, I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. No, it’s been 21 years. It’s never made sense to me. Well, we’ve got VU but loads more time here is cyber incident cases and takeaways. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio’s continuing coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon. We are all convened at the Oregon Convention Center in downtown Portland and Nonprofit radio is sponsored at the convention at the conference by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now to have a conversation is Steve Sheer. He is CEO and co-founder of Riprap Security. Steve. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Have you done your session? I have done my session. We were the first in the first session on the first day. So you set the bar high. I feel bad for the presenters that came after you. We just met a few minutes ago and I’ve already, I already know that you set the set, the bar high. Uh gave quite a challenge to the uh to the presenters that that succeeded. You. Your topic is cyber incident, uh preparation and what we can learn from real world incidents. So it sounds like you uh you are bringing some stories that we all are glad that it did not happen to us. Um Maybe these are major headline stories. I don’t know, maybe these are some of the big ones, but we can uh we can take some things away. Exactly. Ok. Ok. Um Why did you feel the need for the session? Yeah. So um I run a cybersecurity consulting company that’s focused on mission driven and purpose driven organizations and helping them improve their cybersecurity. And one of the key ways that we start working with new clients is that they call us and they say, hey, my house is on fire. We’ve experienced an incident, we need help and so we go and we help them and it, when we go in and we’ve never met them before and they don’t, they’ve not really prepared for an incident. The incident is much more severe. They end up incurring a lot more losses. They have a lot, it’s all very, it’s all much more stressful and the chance of recovery is lower than if they had prepared ahead of time to deal with an incident. And so the, the talk is all about how organizations can prepare ahead of time to make it less stressful, to make it cost less to respond to an incident and really reduce the impact of the incidents that happened to the organization. Ok. Iii I don’t think I’ve, I’ve thought about that or I haven’t heard it said that way that you can make it less impactful, less of a crisis by preparing. I mean, what I’ve heard is you should prepare because you can, well, you can never eliminate the possibility. You can greatly reduce the possibility of being attacked having an incident yourself. But you can actually make it less with preparation? Ok. Excellent, excellent. So um is it, are we just gonna share a bunch of unfortunate stories and, and take away lessons from each one? Maybe we can talk through some of the best practices and I can weave in some, some stories here and there. So why don’t we start with some of your, your best advice? Sure. So I think the primary thing that you want to do is when you’re preparing for an incident is really ensure that you have really good buy in from your stakeholders in inside your organization. So people that are working in the marketing and communications portion, senior leadership members of the board, so that they’re involved in the planning and the preparation process. So that when you do have an incident, they’re not caught by surprise. This is not the first they’re hearing about how to deal with an incident. And so, you know, we, we tend for organizations that, that have not prepared. We, we end up spending a lot of time trying to brief the senior leadership and the board about what’s happening and they were very nervous and they don’t, they don’t let the, the the people responding to the incident have time to actually respond to the incident. And, and part of what they don’t have in place is a AAA management plan for this crisis, right? I mean, uh um if it’s, if it’s become public now, we have APR issue. So, who’s the, who’s the public facing voice? Is it our, is it a, is it a crisis communicator that we’ve, we, we knew we would hire in an emergency or are we scrambling for that? Should it be the CEO, should it be the board chair? You know, uh, should it be the chief technologist or if we have one, our audience is small and mid size nonprofit. So the likelihood that they have someone devoted to tech, tech is, you know, off and on because I’m certainly not 100% don’t, but, but a lot don’t. So you know, who should even be the voice? And then what should we be saying? How much should we be telling the public and our stakeholders? So, all right. So we need to have a plan in place um as well as managing the expectations that you’re saying of the board, the C Suite. Alright. What else? I think another important thing is really clearly defined roles and responsibilities of who’s going to be involved and when should they be involved in an incident? Right. So you touched on it already is, when do we bring in the CEO or the board to talk with the public on our behalf or? Hey, when does it make sense to not have them do that? Who is responsible for taking the operational steps to respond to the incident? The hands on keyboard, very technical investigation that goes along with responding to an incident. What third parties do you need to bring in? Um, depending on the type of incident you need to bring in your web development team if you’ve outsourced the web development team, because the website is having an incident, but you wouldn’t need to bring them in. Maybe if you’re having a ransomware attack on one of your, your computers, right. They’re not probably the right people to bring in. So you really want to make sure that you’re involving all the right internal first party and third party people and assigning them roles, specific roles and responsibilities. So that, you know, hey, we need to do this thing. We need to go talk to this person who’s directly responsible for this activity. OK. Yeah. Um Who’s gonna speak and then you know who’s gonna speak to uh are there aside from the public, if this involves donor data, volunteer data, who’s gonna speak to those groups? What do we say to them? How do we reassure them? Um Yeah, I’m giving chills. I mean, my synesthesia is kicking in. Actually, I really did. I just got chills thinking about because I’m, I’m not a CEO of a nonprofit. This is I’m a one person entrepreneur. It’s not gonna happen to me like most likely, but to put myself in that position and to try to figure that out and now maybe we’ve got press calling perhaps. I mean, I’m kind of thinking worst case the press is calling, what do we say to them? Like if you say no comment, that sounds bad. Do you not respond at all? And then they’ll just say, well, we’re not, was not immediately available for comment. Maybe that’s better. I don’t know. But ok, I don’t wanna have to and then it’s a crisis, it’s a crisis and the whole planning you deal with these. I mean, we do, let’s take a worst case scenario. I mean, how do you, how do you walk in and manage the, I’m gonna make it even worse. Do you get called in by organizations you’ve never talked to before? And that’s the most stressful. You don’t know anybody. We know, we don’t know anybody, we don’t know their technology, we don’t know much about them. And what do you do? We, you know, you learn real quick. Uh You ask a lot of pointed questions and you figure out who the right people to have in the room are because we find that there tend to be too many cooks in the kitchen when we show up. Right. There’s too many people involved and they’re causing more uh rotation and more work to be generated than really what there needs to be. So we really focus on, hey, who are the key people we need to bring in and then the people that are kind of excluded from that group, say more senior leadership, we promise them, hey, we’re gonna give you an update every hour or every three hours or every day so that they know what to expect when they’re going through an incident that they should. Ok. At three o’clock, someone’s gonna come and brief me on what’s going on and tell me what are our next steps, right. So we, we keep, keep everything really communicative and what that also prevents is we also tend to go in and serve as a bit of a firewall between the upper leadership and the board and the very technical people in terms of blocking and managing access to the people that are trying to do the hands on keyboard work so that they’re not disrupted by someone saying, oh, I need an update. I need an update is calling and I can now I can’t deal with the crisis. Oh man, how do you, that was like promotion for riprap security. How do people find you in that kind of crisis again? An organization you’ve never talked to before? Yeah. So it’s a lot of word of mouth. It tends to be, you know, who, who knows an organization that can, that can help us. Um And you know, there are a lot of organizations that can, can help, but there are not that many organizations that are equipped to work with nonprofits that are attuned to their needs and the times of data and stakeholders that they’re working with. And that’s why we like to work with these mission driven organizations is because we have a lot of experience there and we, we really can feel like we help them because we’ve, we’ve responded to incidents, all sorts of incidents with all kinds of different nonprofits and other mission driven organizations. All. Let’s, let’s take it down a notch now from the, from that worst case, like somebody you’ve never heard of before and they’ve never heard of you and they’re calling panicked. Right? I mean, they are panicked. Alright. We can remove ourselves from that situation. Let’s go back, let’s go back to some of your uh your, your advice for uh for preparing. Yeah, so, uh, I, I think the next thing to really understand is you got to really understand what your capabilities are. What, what about incidents and managing incidents? Are you realistically going to be able to handle on your own? Do you have a very technical person that’s going to be capable of doing the analysis and the investigation to figure out how the attacker got in where the attacker is, what the attacker is doing? Or do you need to make sure you go find somebody to help you do those things? I mean, the reality is most organizations they don’t have a person like that. Um, basically forensics, forensic forensics, deep digital forensics. And you know, we, unfortunately, we, we’ve come in in a lot of cases where our nonprofit, our nonprofit partners, they think they can rely on some existing third party relationship that they’ve got say with their it managed service provider or their web developer to help them address the incident. But the instant response is like pretty specialized set of capabilities, right? So you wanna certainly include those people in the incident response, but you really need to know you have someone that can help take you through from beginning to end from identifying that the incident has happened all the way through recovery to help you through that whole process. And though understanding your who’s, who’s on your team, who’s responsible for what um and really making sure that there’s clear lines and expectations is really key to making sure that you can successfully recover. Can we, can we launch into one of our unfortunate stories? Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah. Uh we, we worked with one organization. Um It’s about 100 person um company and it’s a nonprofit. It’s a nonprofit. Yeah. And uh what happened to them is that they, uh uh they didn’t have multi factor authentication configured for uh their, their email. And uh an attacker was able to gain access to the emails of the CEO the coo and the CFO and the attacker sat for months watching emails come in and out of these three mailboxes and they were able to understand what, what, what is the process this nonprofit uses to get new vendors on boarded. What is the process for the vendors providing the bank account information for how to pay the vendors. What’s the process for when a vendor needs to send an invoice to the nonprofit, for the work that they’ve done and what they were able to do. So they’re, they’re, they, I went to law school. Well, I used to be, I used to practice law. They’re lying in. Wait, I would say this is what, this is what makes it a first degree murder and lying in. Wait type murder versus a heat of passion. This is lying in. Wait. Exactly. Yeah. And Attackers will maintain access for a long time in an organization to really learn about them in the same way that I learn about an organization when I’m trying to work with them, right? I want to profile all the activity and understand how to make them more. Did you used to be a bad guy? Did you come over the other side? Luckily not my style. Um And so what happened was that the, the attacker understood this payment flow and this vendor approval process and was able to issue their own invoices or they were able to issue their invoices to this nonprofit. The nonprofit was just paying them just they said, ok, this isn’t approved, everything looks fine. They posed as the CFO and the coo to like give the approvals, sending an email on their behalf and giving the approval stamp and just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just walked out the door over a six month period and no one, no one realized, right? So there’s, you know, the there’s the aspect of, hey, you should have had multi factor authentication configured to protect those accounts. So the attacker couldn’t even get in from the beginning. But there’s also the side of, hey, what is your, what is your vendor approval and uh vendor invoice approval process look like and how, how could an attacker use that process and take advantage of it to issue their own invoices and get the money sent to their own account. So there’s, there’s a bit of a traditional cybersecurity and it portion of this incident and how to recover from it and as well as a more financial and a financial process and accounting process that, that we help them improve um to make it less vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Once the crisis is over, then make it less likely to happen again. So that money was never recovered, was never recovered. Um Do, do nonprofits typically co-operate with law enforcement or would they rather just let it go, make it go away and, and, and the uh end the nightmare? Yeah. Uh it’s about 5050. We find um you know, there are some, there are some nonprofits that have an obligation to report something like that if they’re working with say health data or something like that, really something to be truly sensitive. Um A lot of organizations we talk with them about that of like, hey, you know, it’s worth reporting this. Like you’re not gonna get in trouble for being attacked, you know, it’s, and uh I, we, we almost always recommend going to talk with law enforcement. We almost always recommend that we submit the, the technical indicators of the, of the, of the attack. Like how the attacker, what the attacker did, how they did it to the, the federal law enforcement authorities so that they can go and cross analyze that information and try to help more people and try to, in some rare cases, go and track down the Attackers and, and do things like make arrests and disrupt the operations, rare cases though. Ok. So at least contribute to the, the FB I’s database of forensics and then maybe not pursue prosecution or. Well, it doesn’t sound like there’s prosecutions very likely not. Like, can nonprofits participate like that? Like, anonymously, the FBI is not just not gonna reveal the identity. You could go to your FBI field office that’s in, that’s in your state or your city and go and make these reports if you need to. There’s, um, a federal cybercrime task force that has a forum open that we use pretty regularly. If you wanted to submit something anonymously, you could do that through that, that, that manner. Ok. Um, and do you do the forensics, can you, can you figure out how they got in what they did? Yeah. Yeah. So we, you know, we kind of the process and the workflow of the incident is after we get called or we see that there’s a potential incident happening. We start in the stage called identification. We’re really trying to profile what the threat is, what they’re doing, what they start to understand what the impact is so that we can go start taking steps to say, hey, let’s make a plan for how we’re going to contain the attacker. So the attacker cannot, we want to essentially put a force field around what they currently have access to and kick and start to limit their ability to escape out of and, and pivot away and gain more access to the environment. So after we are able to contain them, we work to eradicate their presence. So we, we remove access to accounts, we will pull computers from desks and erase them and reformat them. Um We’ve, we’ve done a lot of work. This is when the attacker knows now that, that they’re being, they’re being surveilled typically. Yes. Yeah. We, we, we’ll look under cabinets behind desks up in the drop ceiling in closets to make sure there’s no computers or devices that are hidden in those areas that the attacker is maybe using to. They’ve gained some physical access to the organization. It happens. Yeah. There’s sometimes there’s physical access. Oh my God, it’s even creepier. It’s way creepier. Where have they been? Right? Have you seen that? We’ve seen that damn. Is that, is that a disgruntled employee could be a disgruntled employee could be an attacker that, you know, they’re wearing an orange vest and they have a tool bag and they walk right in, you know, there’s a lot of these ways to, you know, just kind of walk waltz in and uh with Verizon, you optimize your, uh your wi fi we’ve seen evidence of degraded signal. We’re very proactive. Come on in. We’d all have, we all love higher performing wifi all. Oh my gosh, physical presence, man. Ok. Um Alright, so the takeaways from that, let’s just, just go a little more detail. That’s a, that’s a bad story, a couple, couple 100 1000 dollars. What do we take away from this? So what we take away is that you really have to understand the, the the impact of the incident to really understand what are the goals of the attacker? Is it opportunistic? Are they being specifically, is the organization being specifically targeted? We’re finding these days it’s more opportunistic of like the Attackers are not specifically targeting an organization. They’re just sort of, you know, hoping they get into any organization. And the question we get from a lot of nonprofits and any organization that we work with on an incident is like, why us, you know, and, and it’s unfortunately like it’s almost impossible to say, right? Um And they’re like, who would do this to us? I’m like, well, it could be anybody. Right. It’s, these people are all around the world. You know, it’s hard, they’re hard to track down. Um, even, even for the government, it’s hard to track these people down. And so we kind of help redirect that energy and it’s like, ok, you know, we, we may not be able to tell who did it or why they did it. But let’s get you to a better perspective. Let’s get you to a better place. Because what we end up doing after we’re able to remove the attacker is we, we have to work to help the organization recover and get back to business as normal. Now, most organizations that do this on their own without any help, they sort of kick the attacker out and then they just go back to doing business as usual without fixing the underlying reason. The attacker got in, in the first place and that’s a tough thing to come back or to return to somewhere or to get called in later or say we thought we had it under control, we won’t get struck by lightning twice. Exactly. Right. You know, if you’re not a, it’s not a good strategy if you don’t lock your front door, you know, it’s kind of like this happens again. Shame on you. Right. It’s like you gotta take the time. And so we work with the organizations who say, hey, how did the attacker get in? What are the things that we can do to close that method of access in the future. What are the other security capabilities that you can put into place the policies, the technology and what people need to be involved to make it so that you’re prepared for the next time. Um And then what we, what we always recommend and this is a thing that uh a lot of organizations skip as well is we, we have a very lengthy uh lessons learned session and the lessons learned sessions are really critical because you really want to bring in all the stakeholders from the dealing with the incident after everything is done while everything is still fresh in your mind. And you want to start understanding what did we do? Good? Like what do we do really well in the incident, we communicated, we bought pizza for everybody. So no one had to leave the office like simple things like this, right? And what, what didn’t we do? Well, like, ok, well, you know, it turns out the attacker was in the network for six months like that we should have known five months or 5.5 months ago. Um You know, things like that and then what we recommend is giving specific, having specific action items with specific due dates assigned to specific people so that things get followed up on. And that every time you have to step through this process, you’re improving a little bit more, you’re reducing the impact of future incidents and you’re just better prepared for the next time that it happens. What’s the, uh, proportion that you see that, uh, nonprofits take that proactive step after the crisis to mitigate the likelihood and the impact of a future crisis. Um, these days, the rate is much higher than it used to be. Five years ago. We wouldn’t have seen many follow through unless they’re quite a large organization. But people feel the pain and people see this in the news all the time. Right. They, they see major corporation Southwest. Yah. I don’t want our providers pipelines. Right. It’s always in the news. So people are a lot more aware of it. Want to have the conversation. It’s less of like, oh, no, we’re totally secure. Nothing can ever happen to us. Sort of just like hoping that nothing happens. But they, they want to engage more deeply and say, like, what do we really need to do? You know, what are the, what is the foundational things we need to put in place that we just don’t have. How did you come up with Riprap security? What’s the significance of that? Yeah. So, Riprap is a type of shoreline protection on, like, in a bay or on a river. It’s all rocky and the erosion patrol like those sort of not really rock walls but little rock islands or mounds that riprap. That’s exactly right. So you’re protecting the nation’s coastline, like our Coast Guard, our silent warriors. We’re not, we’re not quite as seaworthy, I think, but, uh, get nauseous sometimes. Um, let’s see, being able to hold the incident, incident, preparation discussions and leadership. Is that why we talked through a lot of that? Um Have you seen, I, I feel like I’m, I’m speaking to law enforcement, you know, like, uh about uh crime trends in the nonprofit community. Have you seen ransomware? Ransomware is a common one? We see you got a ransomware case story. You can tell we, we deal with these a little bit less these days than we used to. Um You know, honestly, the fact that people are more organizations are more fully remote means that the ransomware has trouble spreading to other devices on a network. So that definitely is a, is a nice thing to work from home or work remotely. Um But we’ve had cases where um we, we, we worked with one, this is one company. They’re, they’re quite small and um they’re 50% manufacturing company that we worked with and they called us up one day and they said, hey, we’re having this ransomware incident and our production floor of like they made um like metal machine parts, our production floor, everything is encrypted by ransomware. All the business side of the network was encrypted, everything was fully offline. They sent out most of their employees home and they’re just, you know, they turn the lights off right. They’re like, what do we do? And so we’re there, we’re trying to understand. We’ve identified obviously that there’s ransomware. We’re trying to understand, you know what it is, how they got in and the it director comes in and he’s like great news. I have backups like, oh, this is great. No one ever has backups. Right. Because if you’ve got backups, you can restore the data, you can get back to normal. No problem. So he stored them at his house in a little safe in his house, brought him back. He takes them out of the box and the, the, the backups are, they’re a week old, so it’s not ideal, but a week ago is better than nothing or two weeks. Um And he opens the box, it’s like an old tiny, like lunch crate, metal lunch crate. And they are tape drives and tape drives are uh like almost like a cassette deck. Um But they’re, they’re, they used to be used very frequently to store a large amount of data, but the downside is, are very slow to help move data on and off those tape drives. So I’m like, ok. All right. So he’s gonna say, oh, I’m gonna go restore the data to get us back up and running. He comes back a couple of hours later. He’s like, it looks like this is gonna take 14 days to restore our data. Like that’s a, that’s a really long time. And so ultimately, the leadership of the organization decided to pay the ransom because it was gonna cost them less. I think it was four or $500,000. It was gonna cost them less to get, to pay the ransom, to unlock the computers than it was for them to be down for two weeks. And that’s a hard choice for an organization to make. We’re paying the bad guys, but it’s a business decision. It’s a business. You see, are these foreign actors? Not this one specifically. But do you see a lot of foreign actors as the bad guy when you can identify, maybe, maybe, sometimes you can’t even identify where in the world they’re located. It tends to be pretty geographically spread. Um You know, there, there is a whole business model and, and business life cycle for these ransomware attacks. So an organization, uh 11, malicious organization will go and they’ll perform the initial um exploitation of a, of an organization. So they’ll go in, they’ll get access to a computer or an account and they do that tens of thousands of times and they’ll, they’ll collect all these logins and then they’ll sell them to ransomware Attackers. So there’s almost, they’re almost like a data broker providing these account credentials and this access to the ransomware Attackers and then the ransomware Attackers will go and they’ll install the ransomware on the computers that are associated with these accounts and they’ll just see who calls them back. And so there’s this whole ecosystem of, hey, you know, uh the Attackers know, like they need to be pretty, pretty quick to respond to their customers email, right? Their victims emails. Otherwise people aren’t going to trust that they’re going to provide the key if they get paid. And so we tend to, we tend to say that they’re so they’re good on customer service, customer service because there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. They, they, they’re great communicators, some big corporations, I promise we’ll get back to you within 15 minutes. Uh Crypto are they, are they typically paid in Cryptocurrency, typically paid in crypto? Um And they have a variety of different cryptocurrencies that they’re using almost as many as you can count. Um And they take pretty significant steps to once you’ve paid them, they typically give you one address to send the money, the, the, the, the digital currency to and from there, it’s almost immediately um essentially like chopped up into smaller chunks and sent out to, you know, potentially hundreds of other, you know, digital currency and Cryptocurrency accounts. So it’s very difficult to trace that, that kind of that kind of thing. Have you seen a case where the ransom was paid? And the key was not provided, the encryption key wasn’t provided. We’ve seen, we’ve seen where the attacker has provided the wrong decryption key by mistake. Uh But email them back back, he made a mistake they sent the customer, they got back to you. So you don’t have to go through a gateway or anything 800 number. Just go right to the right to the principal and then they provided the correct key. Now, now you do have to be careful. Right. We don’t, we don’t recommend paying the ransom. Not necessarily, but if it’s a business decision, um, you do have to be careful because, uh, the Department of Treasury and law enforcement agencies, they, um they’re very closely tracking these ransomware Attackers and what they do is they’ve placed some of these Cryptocurrency wallet addresses on the sanctions list. So the same sanctions list that has uh Russian oligarchs and um you know, um Chinese hackers through financial crimes enforcement network, Department of Treasury. I know exactly. So, what’s the, what’s the caveat there? The caveat is that you could potentially be in sanctions violations by paying one of these ransomware hackers. Um If it’s, if it’s a track sanctioned uh uh Cryptocurrency, it’s the Russian hacker or the Indian hacker and the Treasury Department are both, it’s not a good position, you want to call your lawyer for sure. All right. That’s a, that’s a great caveat. Alright. So what can we take away from this, uh, this uh lessons learned from this particular ransomware account at the manufacturer? Yeah. So I think the key thing is make sure you have ongoing current backups and uh and a lot of organizations they’ll set up backups, like in this story or they say, ok, we’re taking backups every week. That’s probably fine. But the downside was, they never tested it. Right. They never verified that the data was complete and they never made sure that they understood how long it was going to take them for them to recover. That if they had known they would have probably chosen a different, a different way to back up because it doesn’t cost that much more uh these days to not back up on a tape drive. Say, um are there where in the world are these, are these uh bad actors clustered? Are there, is there parts of the world like II, I mean, I mentioned India and Russia but I’m, you know, I’m not a cybersecurity uh professional. Where, where are these, can you say generalize where these folks might be clustered? So, so they, they tend to be pretty geographically spread. Um You know, the, the, the, the reality is that it’s, it’s no longer that hard for someone to gain the skills that are necessary to do, to perform some of these attacks. And we’re seeing more and more of these organizations of very young people going out and committing these types of crimes and, you know, ultimately being successful in a lot of cases. And so, you know, youtube is great for learning all sorts of things, you can learn how to hack and do all these things on youtube and by research there’s a lot of great information out there. Um, but the reality is like, it’s almost impossible to know who’s doing this in a lot of cases. Right. Either the Attackers are using all kinds of intermediaries and bouncing their communications off other computers all around the world and it’s very tricky to really track them down unless you’re a fins or a large government organization. Um Is there truth that if, if you, if you are a victim of a hack, uh let’s say it’s your credit card, you know, your credit card company says that uh your, your, not only your credit card number but your, your address and maybe your date of birth or something, you know, was, may have been, it may have been, may have been compromised and you know, they’ll typically give you one year in one case. I saw two years which double but still my question gets to the value of all this two years of like credit monitoring and you know, the suspicious monitoring alerts and things like that. But I’ve also read that the, the real value comes more comes longer from the, from the incident because because it’s harder to track back to where it happened, what the source of it was. So like 3 to 4 or five years later, your birth date hasn’t changed, your address might have changed, but a lot of people’s addresses haven’t, so they’ll use what they’ve got and they’ll get lucky and in a lot of the, a lot of their, uh, ill gotten file. So, is, is that true that the, the longer the time, the more value valuable your data is on the, I guess on the dark web in the black market. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think it speaks mostly to the following impact that can have. Right. If someone steals your data, that’s, and there’s a big breach, that’s one thing, but that data gets repackaged and sold to a variety of other people on the, on the dark web and, and, and the reality is that most people, they’re not going to be able to pay attention that long. Right? They can’t change some of these core things about them, like their phone number or their social security number, you know, some of these things. So you really have to be mindful all the time and really watch your accounts and really understand like, what is the impact here, you know, the one year of credit that they give you. I just don’t, I mean, yeah, sure, I’ll take it, I’ll sign up for it, but I don’t see the value because so my, what I’ve read is, is accurate, the longer, the longer the time, the more valuable actually. And the more likely it’ll be used after, after one or two years from the incident. Um, we got a little more time. You want to tell us one more story. And, and some lessons from it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we, we have, you know, we’ve, I’ve told a lot of, like, kind of dark stories, you know, but there are bright spots. Right. So, you know, we, we come in a lot of times, come in an organization, they, they’re having an incident, we work with them, we really, we help, you know, kick out the attacker and the leadership, they really get it right. They really want to understand they really want to learn because, you know, we hear things at conferences and read about online and hear on the news that all these bad things are happening, but it’s not until you really feel it and you’re really in it that you’re like, OK, this is, I understand this, you know, and that that’s a hard lesson to learn certainly. Um But we, we in a lot of cases have been able to say, hey, here’s how you fix the underlying root cause that caused the incident. But you know, here are, here are another 10 things that you could do that are low effort, low cost, very minimal business impact that you can do to really reduce the chance that this is gonna happen again. And it’s those organizations that tend to understand that security and it and operations and the success of their organization are all very deeply linked and that it requires, it’s not just like an activity for it to be worried about or security to worry about. It’s a whole security is a team sport. Everyone has to be involved and be a stakeholder. The reality is that an attacker is they’re gonna, they’re gonna target the CEO and the leadership of the organization when they’re trying to get in. Um And so by bringing all those people all together, it’s just, it leads to better outcomes um to have them involved and have that buy in um in a continuous way. So, is there a bright story? Yeah, the right story is that they were able to kind of plug the holes that they had and, and go on this journey where they were able to modernize their, their it stack and their tools that they’re using and their processes, um you know, really embed security very deeply into that and we’re able to reduce the, the likelihood of, of these kinds of incidents happening again. And we, we, we’re in a spot where we can watch the Attackers attempt these types of attacks and that’s what we really want. So you get early warning that there’s an attempt happening, we can take some additional steps without having to wait six months to learn that you’ve been compromised for six months. Steve Sheer. Thank you very much. He’s CEO and co-founder of Riprap security. Thank you for sharing, Steve. Excellent. 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