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347- 149+ Hr Ransomware Attack with Lee Lahti · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: When the cyber attack hit, I mean, it was all hands on deck for our team, and we were working 16, 18 hours a day. I think my net admin told me in the first 10 days after the cyber attack, he worked like 150 hours.
• 0:14
  Speaker B: Welcome back to today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm your host, Doug Kameen, and today I'm talking with Lee Lati, director of IT At Spectralink Corporation. Welcome to the show, Lee.
• 0:25
  Speaker A: Thank you, Doug. Glad to be here.
• 0:27
  Speaker B: So, before we got on the call, we were talking about. Talking about our history of computers and technology and how we got started in things. And you were like, Atari 2600. That's my jam.
• 0:38
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 0:39
  Speaker B: So, like, like, before we even start talking about leadership, let's go back and talk about things like Pitfall, Pitfall 2, which was better than Pitfall. I mean, I was superior, clearly.
• 0:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, Those were the 80s games on the Atari where you could actually do some things. I got mine. Oh, God. I think it was the original vintage. I think I had mine at Christmas. 76. Could have been 77. But, yeah, I remember Space Invaders time. Oh, yeah. I mean, the original combat that came with it used to play the Indy 500 that you could do with the driving paddles.
• 1:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, I remember the paddles. We had the paddles when I was a kid.
• 1:20
  Speaker A: Well, there was. There was the paddles and the driving controller. So there. Indy 500 was the separate one for that one. But, yeah, I used to get up, remember, on the weekends, getting up real early, jumping on, playing the Atari 2600. My parents would tell me after they woke up, like, a couple of hours after I started playing, I was like, you really need to turn the volume down. Because I would play on this thing constantly as a kid. But, yeah, it was the Atari 2600. That was my first step into technology and wanting me to work in it. I wanted to write computer games until.
• 1:57
  Speaker B: Atari had that thing. Remember, I'm sure you've heard this story about they made too many of, like, what was it, the ET Games or what? You know, Then they buried them all in a landfill in Arizona, you know, and stuff like that.
• 2:08
  Speaker A: And I think a couple years ago, somebody actually found.
• 2:11
  Speaker B: They did.
• 2:12
  Speaker A: They went and dug them up. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, the Atari 2600 was what really got me interested in things. My dad was a programmer for a company called genrad back in Massachusetts, where I grew up. And I kind of just followed in his footsteps. I remember learning to program. Eventually, I think my first computer was a Texas Instruments 99. 4, a TI 99.
• 2:39
  Speaker B: 4Aman, that was a classic. That was mine too.
• 2:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think I got that probably around 83 when I was like in seventh or eighth grade and learned to program on that. And then when I got into high school, I was actually learning to take programming classes. I upgraded from the TI ultimately to a Commodore 128 because it was the newer version of the 64. Had a little bit more power. And I really good at math, really good with technology, kind of the computers still where I wanted to go. I still wanted to write video games for a living. Became a programmer or did. Studied programming in college, computer science degree, eventually graduated from there. Worked for the federal government for about four years as a programmer and very quickly realized that I had more fun playing with computer hardware than I did writing code. And that's actually how I made the transition from being in as a programmer to working with infrastructure and now ultimately networks, cybersecurity, the things that I work on as an IT leader.
• 3:54
  Speaker B: So, so go back to, you know, your, your first roles. You said you worked for, you worked for the federal government. You did, you did some programming work, but you transitioned from being a programmer to doing the. Basically, you know, doing the technology setup and support work.
• 4:07
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 4:07
  Speaker B: And now that was in the 90s. So, you know, I mean, there's a lot, a lot changing at this period, period of time in terms of the technology. What was happening, I mean, like building out new networks. How deep into the netware field were you at one point?
• 4:23
  Speaker A: Oh, Network three. Yeah, yeah, Network four. I was a CNE for a number of years. I remember getting that. That was my, I think my second computer certification. My first one was an A plus cert that didn't have the expiration date on it, so.
• 4:43
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, mine does that too. I got in like a couple years before that did. Yeah, it's great. I'm A plus forever.
• 4:49
  Speaker A: Yep, exactly. Yeah. It's not like I've referenced that certification in the last 25 years, but yeah, I remember getting, I think the A plus certification was my first. Yeah, the. Actually when I was learning about systems, I was still a programmer. So I was, I had. Where I was working, we kind of had an unlimited training schedule through, I think it was Digital Equipment Corporation. They would put on classes and I started, the first year I was doing it, I was taking all the classes about programming and motif. Motif and Fortran and C. And then I started learning about networking and I was concentrating on, I think it was Decnet was the networking protocol that kind of came out of that. But you could also take classes on Novell or you could take classes on Windows nt. And I kind of played around with both of those. And when I moved from the D.C. area out to where I am now in Colorado, the company was looking for somebody who was Netware certified. And I had taken all the classes. I just hadn't gone through and completed the certification. So I had like a six week period where I think I took the eight classes that I needed to to get done to become Network certified. And then that was the first non programming job I had was the title was Network. It eventually became Network Engineer. It was Network Technician, then Network Engineer once I got the CNE certification and then ultimately that company brought me from working externally with the clients to managing the systems in house. And that was actually my first IT manager job back in oh God, 96.
• 6:43
  Speaker C: Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something it has become fairly apparent, I'm sure all of you will agree over the years, that slow vendor response, vendor response times vendors in general. The the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis that causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have IT, and where you want to go, and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open your your eyes to what's possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-Gold-POUND SAND for support. Now, if you're wondering what does this apply to, this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for aws, even Azure Colocation space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with.
• 9:27
  Speaker B: Hey, it's Greg the Frenchman, secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain.
• 9:31
  Speaker A: To request your one on one call.
• 9:33
  Speaker B: Contact us@internetpopularit.net and remember, it will never.
• 9:38
  Speaker A: Cost you a dime.
• 9:40
  Speaker B: Yes. So yeah, the 90s now. So I think back and I remember like just the comparison. I'm a couple years younger than you, but you know, not too many but you know, so maybe like, maybe like 10 or 12, but you know, so in the late, late 90s I've been doing stuff, I've been, you know, my first kind of couple, like tech jobs and computer jobs and everything else. And I remember things like, hey, we need to do an update to Windows NT on these computers and my job wasn't it, but I was going to college and I expressed an interest in that. So they would be like, oh, here's a stack of like four disks and you need to go to every computer, you need to load the four disks in one at a time as it tells you and that'll apply the update to the operating system. And I'd spend like an entire day sitting at babysitting computers thinking stick a 3, 3 1/2 inch floppy disks in into computers to do updates and stuff like that.
• 10:31
  Speaker A: I think in the 90s did we actually do updates to operating systems?
• 10:35
  Speaker B: It might have been an upgrade, you know, like I'm calling it an Update now in 2025, but I'm sure at the time it was like the big deal, like oh my God, it's you know, Windows nt, you know, whatever this new version is of you know, three five one and then there was four and stuff like that.
• 10:50
  Speaker A: So I mean I remember doing upgrades on computers, even my personal computers. Upgrades on like DOS from 3 point, I think it was 3 or 4 up to DOS 5 and then DOS 6.22 and then I want to say Windows for work groups was the first kind of networking that I played with. I remember when Windows 95 came out, that was a huge technology upgrade. And then starting to get into the more of the networking. So Network 3, Network 4, Network 5 and then ultimately Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows got Window Windows 2000 or Windows Networking for small businesses. I remember installing that a lot.
• 11:40
  Speaker B: I did a ton of small business servers. Yeah. SPS 2003, 2008, 2012.
• 11:45
  Speaker A: Exactly. I think.
• 11:47
  Speaker B: Was it 2012? 2011 might have been 2011, the last one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it used Server 2012. Didn't it feel like it did? But yeah, regardless, it was like, you know, you think about all these things and how much, you know, once you hit a certain period in your career. I mean I'm, you know, 25 years into my career and you know. And you're 37, you said. And it's, it's really amazing to think about how significant the changes are in terms of how we've worked and how the, you know, what things have kind of changed. You know, I mentioned about the floppy disks. You know, we used to stuff disks in to do the upper upgrades and now we, now it's all fully automated and pulled from the Internet and how much time something like that consumed and the steps that we had to go through just to get the basic stuff done and how, how, how each of these steps in their, in their individualness, didn't they, I'm sure they felt important at the time, but they didn't feel like dramatic. But when we look back, it's crazy to think of how we used to do things.
• 12:45
  Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that there's, what is it? Newton's Law of technology? I mean technology improves 100% like every 18 months to two years. And yeah, and when you talk about careers that have gone 25, 30, 30 plus years, you've seen a lot of changes in technology. So yeah, how we do things now versus how we used to do them, it's completely different. I mean, working on computers, popping in the cards, having to go in and set the IRQs on the on. Com ports that we used to have to do. Now it's okay, let me plug a USB C connection in. And it really doesn't Matter what it's for, it just figures it out and everything just happens.
• 13:32
  Speaker B: I've got this one universal adapter that has a USB C thing at the end and it's got like 17 ports on the side of it. So it's cool. It'll work, right?
• 13:39
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 13:40
  Speaker B: You know, you think about how many things we've solved, how many challenges have been solved through that type of like technology adoption and that effort to just simplify things and make it easier to work. So I want to change gears a little bit here and talk about. So your current role. You're director of IT at spectralink Corporation. And I think now, you know, maybe even a career trajectory for you. You know, you highlight a lot of the work you do in the cybersecurity space and some other stuff. But I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, what you do in the spectralink, what the, the what spectralink does for our listeners benefit and, you know, maybe some, some information on like kind of where you are in your career currently. Sure.
• 14:20
  Speaker A: Spectralink Corporation, and this is an oxymoron, is a small international manufacturing company. But we make telecommunication devices that are geared toward medical retail manufacturing. It's kind of to make it so it's a little bit more secure, a little bit easier to do. It allows you to a big one. A big area that we do things in is healthcare. So the phones are more secure than your average standard Android or iPhone. We keep the data better protected, but we do. The company has three main offices. Our headquarters is in Louisville, Colorado. We do corporate operations and some engineering development here. We have a sales office in the UK and then we have an engineering office in Horsens, Denmark. And between all of that and then contractors that we work with to help with additional manufacturing or additional engineering kind of makes us, like I said, it's a small global company. And that's actually why I joined them. I'd gotten to the point in my career that I'm like, okay, you know, I want to experience more than working for a small organization because other than working for the government, every company I've worked for has basically been a small business. And I like the idea of, of working for a smaller international company to at least get the base for some skills and learning new experiences. Because when you work in this field, there are a number of days that you don't necessarily learn something new, but by joining a new organization and learning to become a leader or a global company, it was kind of reinvigorating and it's really been interesting Joining and seeing what I've learned about how you manage the technology when you were working across the globe rather than when you're working in just a single building.
• 16:24
  Speaker B: Interesting. So in this role, I'm pulling the depths of your LinkedIn profile to get a little bit of tidbits to start talking about here. But one of the things that you highlight is a lot of your work in the cybersecurity space. And I think just given the nature of what you just described, the goal of spectralink is to provide more secure communications technology. And so I think it's. Without a doubt you have some, you have some kind of cybersecurity stories to share here. And I'd love to hear something that you'd love to. You'd like to share.
• 16:58
  Speaker A: Oh, gosh.
• 17:00
  Speaker B: Or that you can't share. You know, we'll stop to the attorneys, right?
• 17:06
  Speaker A: Oh, God. Can I. All right. Can I go back in time a little bit? Really before cybersecurity kind of became the forefront. More a networking story. I remember the first where I was really learning about wide area networks and doing VPN connectivity. I was working for a company. I was their network operations manager and we were. The company managed a lot of. It was a nonprofit. They managed a lot of affordable housing apartment complexes throughout the country. I think when I worked with them, when I started, they were at about 80 complexes. And when I left about a year later, they had just merged with another organization and they were approaching about almost 200. And we, I was using a VPN client for the first time and the backend was, I think a Cisco Pix firewall.
• 17:59
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 18:00
  Speaker A: And there was a version of the Cisco client and it may very well have been anyconnect because that application had been around for years. But, but I remember we built out a bunch of systems for preparing computers and we would basically get an order from one of the sites and they would order, however, how many computers they needed to run to run the property. And I remember sending a computer to this person. This was back in. When AOL9, I think, just came out. So you get those AOL9. So you'd be able to find those disks everywhere. Yeah, you can, you can walk into a convenience store, you could work. Walk into a grocery store, Kmart, Target, Walmart, whatever. And there would be AOL discs that you could just grab to be able to sign up for their. Their service.
• 18:52
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 18:53
  Speaker A: And right after.
• 18:54
  Speaker B: And that's setting aside the five a week that you got in your mailbox at home, right?
• 18:59
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. And. And we had just sent computers out to a facility in Arizona. And I, I remember the, the, the, the property resident manager signing for the gear and about a couple hours later he's like, I can't connect to the network. I'm like, what do you mean you can't connect to the network? One of the things that we test before we could go out was making sure the VPN connectivity worked. And he's like, no, I can't get on the network. So I'm working with him because, because we didn't have a network connection, I couldn't remote into it. Which back then would have been PC anywhere. I think would have been the technology.
• 19:38
  Speaker B: It's a remote Norton PC anywhere, right?
• 19:41
  Speaker A: Yep. Or, or an early version of remote desktop would have been the other things that we'd used. And walked him through all this testing. My, my team and I spending probably the better part of a day trying to figure out. I'm like, all right, send me the computers back and we'll take a look at it. We get it back and we look at it and there's some a online software on there and a couple of other pieces of non corporate software. So we clean that off or reimage the disks, test it, make sure it works. I triple checking to make sure that the VPN connection worked, send it back to him. I'm like, all right, don't load any non corporate approved software. He signs for it not even 45 minutes later. These computers don't connect to the network. Did you load the ao? Did you load the AO online software? No, no, I haven't loaded anything. I'm like, all right, I'm going to have you send these computers back to me again. But if I find any software that's on there, your facility is going to be paying all the shipping charges. No, no, no, no. There's nothing. I did I get the computer back, plug it in, turn it on, hit the CD button, ejects out and there's the AOL9 CD sitting inside the computer. So I took it and basically mounted it on the wall with a nail and that kind of started the IT that we kind of put together at that company where we would track like the five silliest things that we had ever done. And that sat in position number one for a while.
• 21:08
  Speaker B: So yeah, there was one time. I've told this story on the podcast before. So listeners, listeners who've heard episodes with me probably heard this one before, but I had one where. Now this is just a, this is the, this is a story of Oops. Moments that you know, you had to live through. I was doing consulting work for a manufacturer locally. Here I was at the time, I was an IT consultant and done work for them for several years. So I was well known quantity to them and regular at their offices. And we were installing some new server since like 2008, nine maybe. And their server room is like, it's like 100 year old brick building. And the server room is like the best of what 1986 has to offer in terms of setup. You know, it's like Plexiglas walls, some wood doors and literally wood paneling all around. And then there's just racks that they've got servers thrown on and this pile of cables in the back, just an absolute rat's nest spaghetti of cables underneath. And we had to go and put in, put some new server in or something like that. So. And there was a rack of the actual like telco rack alongside it. So there was some racked stuff. And in order to put stuff in you have to walk behind the racks. So I walk behind the rack and you have to step on the cables because it's the only option. And one rubber cable pulls on the next rubber cable pulls in the next rubber cable through this chain reaction in it. And it yanked out the power plug of the expansion chassis of the AS 400. And it wasn't obvious either. It pulled it out enough to disconnect it, but not enough to drop it. So you didn't know it looked like it was plugged in and. Yeah. So all of a sudden I'm in there with the network admin and doing our work and the guy, the as 400 guy comes storming in. What the hell did you guys do?
• 22:59
  Speaker A: What?
• 23:00
  Speaker B: We didn't do anything. What are you talking about? It turns out we, through some investigation, it's been cut off.
• 23:08
  Speaker A: Yeah. A couple hours later going through, trying to figure out what went wrong.
• 23:13
  Speaker B: Unfortunately it did take long to figure out what had happened because he's like, there's something wrong with the S400. So we started looking at it. Of course you look at the front of the thing and the lights are all off. So we're like, obviously something's wrong. Okay, so, so we started, we started that, you know, that part was easy. But then, you know, of course then you have to IPL an AS400, you know, and a, an initial program load on an as 400 is, you know, a 30 minute affair.
• 23:35
  Speaker A: So yeah, I have a lot of experience with like VMs based systems. So to me that would be my AS400 running the, running the old Alpha. Oh God. Really, really old digital VAC systems. And then, and then, and then ultimately they, they got to the point where they would run on intel based hardware so you didn't even have to have the specialized Alpha hardware anymore. And then it wasn't until just recently, probably five years ago that they got to the point that you could actually virtualize a the VMS operating system and run it under VMware.
• 24:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, I had, when I was in college we had a VAX that was, you know, there was a small VAX for programming work and stuff like that. That's. I believe that's where I, that's where I learned COBOL.
• 24:27
  Speaker A: Ooh. Ooh. Yeah.
• 24:31
  Speaker B: It was the late 90s. So you know like everybody, it was like it was the last heady days of yes, we're still teaching Cobalt because you will all need this to go get jobs doing Y2K remediation work on all the COBOL systems.
• 24:45
  Speaker A: I actually taught myself cobol. I was a, in being a computer science student. I was working in the computer lab and I started helping out and one of the instructors was like, hey, I need a teaching assistant. And I'm like sure, what's the class? He's like cobol. And I'm like okay. So I was learning COBOL as the students was learning it, but I was about two weeks ahead of them learning it on my own. So that when it came time for grading and helping with the exams, I was at least knowledgeable for what they were trying to do that week. But if you'd asked me about what they were doing three weeks before, would not have been able to tell you anything what they were doing.
• 25:28
  Speaker B: And so the irony for me was that that was the only time I ever encountered a vax. But then in multiple roles, you know, jobs over my career I've had as four hundreds and production. And most of the time my job, my job is intersected with the decommissioning of the S400.
• 25:47
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 25:48
  Speaker B: You know like I was a county CIO for, for almost 10 years and my, the one I was at for a really long time that was one of our big projects is we had or I live in IBM country, so I live in the Binghamton, New York area. And this area is where IBM was, was founded in the early part of the 20th century and had it's like primary manufacturing sites and stuff like that. So at one point it was like 30,000 people in this area worked for IBM. It's all basically dissipated at this point as IBM is globalized and doesn't do manufacturing anymore. But, but, but as a, as a consequence of that legacy, there's like tons and tons of like everybody if you were going to buy a core system, you bought an IBM system here. So yeah, you know, like I work for a dairy company. We had an as 400, you know, I worked, you know, we're for the county, they had an S400. We had our own as 400 programmers who trained at IBM's, you know, trained at the sites and then came over to work for the county, you know.
• 26:36
  Speaker A: So yeah, yeah, I, I worked on the vaxes in the mid to late 90s and then when I started getting into the networking, I never thought I would run into a vax again. And the company I worked for bought a new, I was working for a lease management company. I worked there for a number of years and they put in a new financial backend system that they were using actually at the time as the whole financial system and that used to run on a vax. And it was like, it was 15 years almost to the date of the last time I had touched one. I'm like, okay, I vaguely remember this, but this is going to be scary. And it took me a while to remember how to do things. The operating system had changed so much. I think when I used to be a programmer on it it was like VMS4. And then when I started playing with it it was like some kind of version like 8 or 9.
• 27:29
  Speaker B: It's like Celine Dion says, it's all coming back to me now.
• 27:34
  Speaker A: It took a while but yeah, I got to the point where I could be dangerous. But thank God we had consultants that actually did the majority of the management on it.
• 27:42
  Speaker B: So, so change gears again here. I want to make sure we talk about, we talk about leadership and your leadership background and, and you know, you, when you were sharing your career history, you talked a bit about, you talked about your first leadership roles and, and how you moved into your government role. You moved into, you know, an IT support role in the 90s. Then you, as you got your certifications, you moved into more of a leadership and management role. So you've been in management for quite a long time in various capacities. Can you tell us a little bit about what, what, what are you, what are your most important qualities when you're leading teams? How are you, how do you get the most out of them and how are you trying to focus them to, to deliver what you need done?
• 28:26
  Speaker A: Oh, that, that is really a good one. I think the biggest thing for me is even as a, as a leader, I am not going to ask somebody on my team to do something that I'm not willing to do myself. So if it's, if we need to do a deployment and it's okay, well we're rolling out 100 computers today. Okay, well I'm going to physically touch stuff.
• 28:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:50
  Speaker A: I went through a cyber attack a couple of years ago and it was, it was a ransomware attack and we, when it hit it just happened to be, timing wise, got lucky. We were active. It was 11 o'clock at night local time and most of my team was actually online, still working for the day because we had somebody who was traveling to our European site, one of our European sites. And so he was just coming on for the day. My net admin had been, was trying to complete some work for him so that he could take over. I think that my, my systems engineer needed for where he was at. So he was just finishing up for the day and I was actually online kind of just going through emails, getting caught up on stuff that I needed to work on. And when the cyber attack hit, I mean it was all hands on deck for our team and we were, and we were working 16, 18 hours a day. I think my net admin told me in the first 10 days after the cyber attack he worked like 150 hours. So it sounds, yeah, yeah, but, but, but everybody was doing that. It was just like, okay, you know, I'm, if I'm in the office at 6am or if I'm online at 6am to help work on things or troubleshoot stuff that, that we discovered over, over the previous night. Okay. I'm not going to ask my team to work an 18 or a 20 hour day if I'm not willing to do that myself. So I think, I think showing that, okay, when the time is necessary, I'm willing to be hands on, I think really does help me get some of the best out of what I can get out of my team, but also knowing when to delegate because the guys that I've got on my team are experts in what they do. That's the reason why they do our office administration, our systems administration, manage the databases in our Oracle systems, handle our security and network administration, handle the storage or the systems engineering that need to be done for our company. And where I work it's a, we're a small technology company but wow, the technology needs that we have in here because we have so much development and R and D efforts that are going on. When I came in, I was so overwhelmed. Having come from a single location or single location in a cola site finance company. Okay. There was a kind of a finite amount of systems and all of a sudden getting into R and D capabilities, I'm like, okay, I just came from a company that the revenues were 10 times the size of this, but I feel like the smaller company the technology needs are 10 times the size of what I just came from.
• 31:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, like your IT spend, your IT spend is like five times as much it just given the nature of what you have to what you're spending it on.
• 31:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's just making sure that we optimize that and get the best bang for the buck out of everything that we're doing.
• 31:45
  Speaker B: So when you, you mentioned, you know, you find romance, war incident and some other stuff like that. What, what qualities of leadership you think are most important? And I ask this for our, listen, you know, our listeners out there. So inevitably all of us will go through some sort of crisis incident, whether it's a cybersecurity incident or just a general like you know, oops, the server just died. You know, whatever the case may be, what are the most important qualities that you found as a leader to be successful and carry through, you know, from, from the beginning to the end of that process?
• 32:20
  Speaker A: Having the ability to quickly diagnose the scale of a problem, making sure that you communicate and over communicate is probably a good thing regarding where you are on dealing with a situation, whether it be. We're still triaging whether it be, okay, we're now going back through the forensics and trying to figure out what the problem was. We're actively troubleshooting the problem. Okay. We've completed our troubleshooting and now we're just kind of wrapping things up. But making sure you document what has gone wrong, making sure that you've got that communication. And then as I said before, if you have to get involved, great. But know when to be hands on and physically get involved in things or when to be hands off and when you need to be the leader.
• 33:09
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm going to go back to you mentioned about the communication thing and I just share some experience I think that I've had and you know, kind of notes comparison here. So like what I found as far as communication goes and I'll run this like when I was at the county, I started it as a CIO of a county and I get there and you know, there's not a huge like, like earth shattering Crisis. But like a vehicle hits one of the poles to the telephone poles and it knocks out the fiber that communicates between a couple buildings, you know, so the public safety building is disconnected. Next thing you know, I've got the sheriff's, you know, secretary calling there. Well, you know, the sheriff wants to know what's going on. Well, we have an outage. We're working on it. Well, the sheriff wants you to give, like, updates. Call it every, every hour you need to call and give an update to the sheriff and tell, tell us what's going on. I'm like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not calling to give you an update every hour. Like, every time I stop and have to remember to call you and that I do that for everyone else, nothing will get fixed. So just so clear. But, you know, I, I start from there because I think about the efforts that I, that I put in over time to invest in communication. So this goes back to what you had pointed out about the effectiveness of regular, ongoing, honest and open communication pays dividends in the long run. So the time to start that type of process is not when the crisis begins and be like, hey, let's all talk about this. But if you build that level of trust amongst the constituencies that you serve, when the crisis hits, they give you more slack and more, more leeway to trust that you're getting the stuff done. You know, so I, I make the comparison of that. When I started, they were like, we want an update every hour to, you know, six, seven years later, a similar thing happened. Some, you know, I don't actually know. I think the first time was a squirrel chew. But then the second time, you know, seven years later, some car literally hit the pole and snapped it in half. And, you know, this, this, the. Apparently our, our lines love getting aimed by various things. But anyways, the. By that time, you know, I'm six years in and the call from the sheriff's office was, hey, we just wanted to make sure you're. We're sure you're aware, but we wanted to just let you know, you know, officially from us that we, we do have an outage here. And we're like, absolutely. We know. Here's what happened. Here's what's going on. Like, okay, can you just give us an update when, when it's resolved? And, and we'd love to just make sure we, we know what happened. You know, like, and the difference in tone and the request and the demands, the, you know, all these things were dramatically different. And it comes back to that element that, you know, I think you highlighted in your list of important qualities, which is how do you communicate and how do you build an effective communication strategy that helps to alleviate the stress? And the. Because, like. And that investment starts way before the crisis hits number one. And if we do it right, it pays so many dividends because it gives you the breathing room to actually do the work.
• 36:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember saying it was like, okay, we will provide an update as things change. And if we're waiting on a consultant or a third party, like, as you mentioned, a phone outage. Okay. Or an Internet outage, we've lost circuits plenty of times. And. But all we know is that the vendor is working on the problem. And it's like, okay, well, we have no expected resolution time. And two hours goes by, four hours goes by. You've had people that have been in the office that, okay, well, we've lost connectivity to the office. So being in the office doesn't do anything. Your remote users can't get into some of the resources. Even though we try to distribute around the world, something may only be in one location. We may not have redundant access to that capability. And you've got people who are down and yes, you want to tell them, okay, well, we're still. We are working on the problem, but we're waiting on the vendor. And I hate saying that message over and over again, but I also don't want to go a day without providing an update. I want to say, okay, well, when we're in the middle of a situation, let's at least say, yes, we are continuing to work on it. We don't know what the anticipated resolution time is, but we understand how important it is to get this fix done, to resume normal operations so that everybody can get back to doing the things that they need to. Yeah, so we try to do that. But I also don't want to say that message over and over again because it tends to make you look a little bit foolish when you don't really have a true update. So it's finding that balance between communicating the important things versus just communicating for timing's sake, I guess, is a good way to put it.
• 37:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. So I want to step into the humorous side of things for a minute or just the fun side. We've talked about your work on, you know, your early connections with Commodores and Atari, that type of stuff, but I'm going to ask a really serious and critical question. Star wars or Star Trek?
• 38:13
  Speaker A: Star Wars.
• 38:14
  Speaker B: Oh, man. Star Wars. Oh, man. Killed me.
• 38:16
  Speaker A: Killed me. Oh, I saw Star wars when it was called just Star Wars.
• 38:24
  Speaker B: So before Episode four or got renamed retro name Retconned.
• 38:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, I. I remember seeing it in the theater. That tells you how old I was. And back then, my parents could drop me off at the theater with my couple of cousins who were about the same age as me, and we would pay for our tickets. It was like a buck to 50 or something to go in and sit, and we would go and watch the movie, and then they would come back and pick us up. And sometimes we'd stay and just watch it twice. But I lost track of how many times I had seen Star wars at 300, and that was when I was.
• 39:01
  Speaker B: That's. That's.
• 39:02
  Speaker A: I'm.
• 39:02
  Speaker B: I'm calling that statistic out right now. Not. Not as. Only for the purposes of highlighting it in this podcast. Like, that's a. That's a big number right there. 300 times.
• 39:12
  Speaker A: That was when I was 10.
• 39:13
  Speaker B: Wow.
• 39:14
  Speaker A: I remember. I didn't. My family didn't have a VCR then, but I remember going over to a friend's house and they had Star wars on vcr. And every time I was over there, we would play it. And then in college, I had a copy of all three of the movies on a single tape that I had recorded. And I'd be up, like, all night working on a project or doing some homework, and I'd pop it in and it would play as background noise. But because I knew the movies so well, I could just hear it. I didn't actually have to look at it and watch it because I knew what was happening based on the audio or the dialogues or, hell, even R2D2's beeps, I could almost probably tell you what was going on. It tells you how much of a geek and a nerd I am.
• 40:00
  Speaker B: Yeah. Well, now, so Star Trek. I mean. Sorry, Star Wars. So I'm a Star Trek fan, as you might have guessed. But I always clarify, it's not that I don't like Star Wars. I just really like Star Trek. But Star wars has a very active universe of TV shows and movies and other things going on now. Are you keeping up with any of that stuff, too?
• 40:20
  Speaker A: I am behind. I mean, when the Mandalorian came out, I was on that every Friday. I've made it through the first couple of seasons. I think I still have to watch part of the third season. I have not watched andor I've watched most of Kenobi. I still need to watch Ahsoka. I Watched the Book of Boba Fett. So I, I've seen all the movies. I remember pre Pandemic, when episode eight and episode nine came out. Actually I remember when episode seven and Rogue One, when those came out, how difficult it was to get tickets. So I got to the point where I would actually rent a movie theater so that I could have my own private showing. And we would invite, we would invite friends and people that I work with and coworkers and we would fill the movie theater. I mean, I, I never had a large theater, but we always were able to fill like 120 person theater. And we would schedule, we would have our own private showing of it. So we had guaranteed seats on opening night because I would start talking to the movie theaters probably six or eight months ahead of time. We did that with episode eight. We did that with episode nine, which was right before the Pandemic.
• 41:37
  Speaker B: This is pretty cool. Like you're pretty, you're pretty serious about this. Like you're doing big things.
• 41:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean it was, it was people, it would be like $15 a person, but people were so guaranteed to have their own, to be able to see it either opening day or even the preview day, because we would see it at like 8:00 or 9:00 on Thursday night before it was readily released on Friday. And you, you mentioned Star Trek. I mean, I love Star Trek. I love watching some of the, the old TV series, the original series, Next Generation, and I follow that too. But I'm so much more heavily involved and invested in Star Wars.
• 42:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, my older son is super into Star Trek, so we watch it together. We're actually currently, we've moved our way through multiple series. We're currently in the middle of the original series, which I think is great because I mean, I watched it as a kid growing up on rerun syndication for years. But the, the dialogue, the storytelling, the things that were there, like, I look back and I was like, oh, my son might think this is like, you know, chintzy or cheap or whatever, but he's actually pretty into it because it holds up quite well for what it is. Like as long as you accept the fact that, you know, hey, in 1967, this was the best they could do for special effects and other stuff like that. And the method of which you tell stories had to be different in the media that was there. You know, if you needed to do off screen, you know, if, if somebody, if somebody had something terrible happen, you just did it off screen and you had somebody look up with a horrified look. And you just had to imagine what was happening. Right. You know, what you saved on the special effect. So, you know, like, like it was. It was compelling in its own way. But I would. Focusing on, just based on the things you told me you have, I'm going to. I'm going to declare you to have a certain expertise in this and therefore a valid opinion that would be influential, if you will. On what current series are some of the best? Like if you were ranking like the Mandalorian, the Boba Fett or any of those, like, what was the better ones? What ones are not the better ones?
• 43:40
  Speaker A: I think of the ones that I've seen and as I said, I have not seen everything that has come out on Disney plus since. Since they've taken over. I really did enjoy the Mandalorian seasons one and two. Can't say everything about season three because I still have to get. To get into that. I did like Obi Wan. The book of Boba Fett was. Had some good parts to it, but it was also. There were parts where it was slow. And then. Oh gosh, even getting into some of the Star Trek stuff. What's the. The new one about the Stranger Ones, the new. The new live action one, Strange New Worlds. And then the animated one below.
• 44:16
  Speaker B: Lord Xlordex is so. Well, lower decks just ended. They ended their run five seasons, but yeah, there was lower decks. I refer to lower decks as like a love letter to Star Trek fans because that's how it's built. It's literally built to make all sorts of inside jokes and references while still being accessible to anybody who doesn't know all the inside jokes.
• 44:36
  Speaker A: And I remember watching in the Star Trek area, one of my favorite original series episodes is the Trouble with Tribbles. And then when they did the DS9 episode where they go back in time and they're all interacting with it, I thought that was one of my favorite Deep Space Nine episodes. Just how they tied that all in.
• 44:59
  Speaker B: Together out of Star Trek series. Deep Space Nine is my jam in Star Trek. So I love Deep Space Nine as it, don't get me wrong, definitely love Next Generation, the original series. But if I'm picking something I want to sit and watch over and over again. I love watching D Space Nine.
• 45:16
  Speaker A: I mean, seven seasons, 20ish episodes per season. You got a lot to binge watch if you're gonna watch the whole series.
• 45:22
  Speaker B: 173. About 175 episodes for each of the series that went seven seasons now. And there was a statistic that I saw somewhere that showed the number of hours just because of the mediums that they were developed for. The number of hours that's available to consume, if you will, of content in Star Trek is like an order of magnitude larger than Star Wars. Like it's like thousands of hours of, of, you know, media content or content to consume in the Star Trek world, but only like a couple hundred hours of Star wars content or something like that. My figures are not precise. I can't remember. I was, I was actually trying to look it up while we were talking, but I couldn't find it fast enough.
• 45:59
  Speaker A: Now would that be like audio, visual content or would you be getting into like books, movies, tv?
• 46:06
  Speaker B: Just movies tv, like stuff you could watch on the screen?
• 46:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, that I would definitely agree with because you've had multiple series that went six or seven seasons versus all the Star, the Star wars series, many of them are only six to 10 episodes. And you're lucky if you're getting a second or third season out of that. And then you have to, then you have to wait 18 months or two years to be able to watch season two after season one comes out. Whereas like with Star Trek, you were getting a new series every year, you were getting 20, 25 episodes per season.
• 46:43
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, it added up.
• 46:44
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 46:45
  Speaker B: So we're coming up to the end of the, of today's episode of the podcast and before we leave, I, I, I always try to make sure to ask our guests or your advice to emerging leaders in the space and what would you, what would you give? So I actually asked this two ways. One is, what would you give to, what advice would you give to emerging leaders about becoming a leader? And two, what would you tell yourself if you could go back in time and tell your younger self like, hey man, don't do that, you dummy.
• 47:12
  Speaker A: Oh, oh, all right. To an emerging leader, I have to say, find your leadership style. Find what works for you. I know for me, I kind of like to say my leadership style is informed. Hands off. So I talk to my team on a daily basis. It may just be in a stand up, it may just be okay, hey, let's have a quick catch up call. Just tell me what's going on on this project. But I'm going to trust them to work on the project and meet the deadlines or the tasks that they've told me that they can meet. And then I'm going to use that information to be able to provide updates to my leadership team. So usually the executive or senior team in the organization and when things change or when there's problems that arise, I'm going to go back to each of those different groups to say, okay, we've had a change in priorities. We now have to either drop this task or we have to work on it more from my team level, or I'm going to go to the execs and say, okay, we've run into problems. We are expecting to have a delay in this project and try to communicate that as early as possible. It's not good going into a meeting with the leadership team and having to tell them that, okay, we thought we were going to meet this deadline, but we're not going to. And I'm kind of reporting that we're not going to make that deadline to them. Two hours before the deadline. That really doesn't look good. Oh, now what would I tell my past self? Find a way to invest in Google at an early time frame.
• 48:52
  Speaker B: Or any. Or any tech, you know, any of the tech stocks. Right?
• 48:56
  Speaker A: Like Nvidia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that. That would be a big one. No, really, if I could tell myself what if I had to tell myself something that I knew now that I didn't know back then, it would be probably to think about cyber security at an early stage in my career and not really when I got rust into it, probably for the first time maybe 10 years ago. Think about, think about the cybersecurity capabilities thing that you had to think about back in the late 90s or early the early 2000s, and become the expert that I want to be now back then so that I can hopefully kind of not necessarily change the trajectory of my career, but maybe have a little more variation in it than what I've done.
• 49:47
  Speaker B: Lee, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 49:51
  Speaker A: This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
• 49:52
  Speaker B: That's a wrap on today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm Doug Kameen and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.