UnHacked - Cybersecurity Made Simple for Small Businesses

Justin Shelley (00:00)
Welcome everybody to episode 74 of unhacked and also our first episode in almost two months. Guys, what the hell happened? It, we, we've all been on a bit of a hiatus. We can call it holidays. We can call it, I don't know. What do we call it? What happened?

Bryan Lachapelle (00:15)
⁓

Mario Zaki (00:17)
Slacking.

Justin Shelley (00:18)
slacking.

Bryan Lachapelle (00:18)
Working really hard on other tasks and other responsibilities.

Justin Shelley (00:21)
I guess, I guess, but ⁓ key to everything is consistency and boy, we better get back to it. So here we are at the beginning of 2026. I am titling this episode. Welcome to 2026. So clever and creative guys. I am Justin Shelley, the CEO of Phoenix IT advisors and my company, we help businesses build their wealth using technology and these days everything AI and then protect that wealth from the Russian hackers among others.

government fines and penalties and class action lawsuits. That's what I do. Brian, tell everybody who you are, what you do and who you do it for.

Bryan Lachapelle (00:58)
All right, I'm gonna be a little rusty at this because it's been so long. But my name is Brian Lashfell with B4 Networks based out of beautiful Niagara, Ontario, Canada. And we help business owners remove their frustrations that come with dealing with technology. And we do that by putting you through our journey that helps you solve your problems over time.

Justin Shelley (01:01)
I know.

All right, Mario, you're up.

Mario Zaki (01:23)
Mario Zacchi, owner of Mastek IT located in New Jersey. We work with small to medium sized businesses and we specialize in helping business owners sleep better at night knowing that their business will be there the next day.

Justin Shelley (01:38)
And, know, these days that's a question every time you go to bed. Have I been hacked? Has everything been wiped out while I slept? Great. ⁓ Brian, when you say every, every time you introduce yourself, you say beautiful Niagara. ⁓ I was actually on a podcast by another fellow Canadian. He lives 500 miles north of Vancouver. So not really your neck of the woods, but I wonder if it's a Canadian thing because he, he taught, and by the way, his name is John Brink. His podcast is.

Mario Zaki (01:42)
You

Bryan Lachapelle (02:01)
Nope.

Justin Shelley (02:07)
is called on the brink. Go check it out. Great podcast. ⁓ I mean, my episode was the best one. ⁓ Anyways, he the thing that he said that stood out to me is he wakes up every morning and he goes outside and he says, I live in paradise. And I've adopted that I've started. ⁓ I've started making that my own personal mantra because there's a lot of there's a lot of shit going on in the world, especially in our industry. And sometimes we need that that reminder. So

Um, guys, we have an interesting conundrum today and, uh, you know, we're about a half an hour late getting started to record because our guest, the first one of the year, no showed us. Um, it's been a while since we've been no showed. I'm not super pleased about that, but I think we can pull this out. We can, uh, we could come up with a pretty good episode here. We're going to talk about 2025. What did we learn? And then we're going to all pull out our little.

crystal balls and we're going to look into them and see what 2026 has in store for us. That sound like a plan since since we don't have a guest anyways. All right. So 2025 in the world of technology in Brian, I'm going to go ahead and let you run with this thing first. What did you learn? What is, what is the one thing that comes to mind as you look back over last year?

Bryan Lachapelle (03:07)
Sounds great to me.

Mario Zaki (03:07)
Sounds good.

Bryan Lachapelle (03:25)
Yeah, throughout the entire year, we've had a lot of conversations with a lot of different people on our podcast. I've met with a lot of clients, a lot of ⁓ potential clients, and went to lot of conferences and spoke with lot of vendors. And the biggest takeaway for me for the entire year, and I'm gonna talk about cybersecurity here because we are a security-based podcast. And the biggest takeaway for me was that most cybersecurity problems

don't start with a hacker being a genius. They start with a normal business being too trusting, too exposed, and too unprepared. So that, to me, is the biggest takeaway for 2025, is that if you do just the, not the bare minimum, but if you just do something and you create a plan to do a little bit every single week, every single month to improve your posture, ⁓

and you assume that there's already somebody in your staff who's going to click something, you assume that someone will get through your security, and you build your systems so that one mistake doesn't become a full blown disaster, I think we'll be in a much better position than the majority of the businesses out there. That's my takeaway.

Justin Shelley (04:40)
Yeah.

It sounds like a lot like your weekly sign off of, of, know what? I'm at the gym this morning. Okay. So, on, on one of the mirrors, I see this line that says, ⁓ 1 % better every day. I'm like, my God, Brian's been here either that, or you stole that saying and you didn't come up with yourself and other people use it too. I don't know.

Bryan Lachapelle (04:45)
I wonder why.

Mario Zaki (04:45)
Does.

Bryan Lachapelle (05:00)
I have, yep. I mean, it's a pretty good mantra.

I most certainly did not.

I did not come up with that saying. Actually, was, I was reading the book, Start With Why, and I believe it's Simon Sinek, and in there he talked about how, imagine if you were running a company and you were telling your, and you had a problem, and you were working with a client and you failed at something, and you went to the client and says, I failed at this, but one of the things that sets up this apart, one of the things that makes us different is that,

Justin Shelley (05:08)
Where'd you get it?

Mario Zaki (05:11)
at a gym.

Justin Shelley (05:16)
Okay.

Bryan Lachapelle (05:33)
We learn from our mistakes. We actually will take what we've failed at and improve from it. We will get 1 % better every day. And I was like, that right there. I love that. I love that whole concept of just always trying to improve ourselves and having the growth mindset versus just trying to do these big, massive things. A lot of businesses try to do these massive undertakings to improve cybersecurity or improve their business. Or people are like, I'm going to lose 100 pounds. It's like, no, I'm just going to lose.

Justin Shelley (05:42)
Okay, okay.

Bryan Lachapelle (06:02)
500 calories, I'm just going to reduce my intake today. And just concentrating on one little thing every single day, the patterns is what matters, not the ultimate objective. Obviously, the objective matters, but you can't become 100 % secure overnight. So what is the plan and how we're going to get there? Yeah, it all came from that book, Start With Why.

Justin Shelley (06:23)
Okay. So I thought you were going to attribute this to Darren Hardy's book, the compound effect. Do you remember when he came and presented on that? Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan Lachapelle (06:29)
I mean, it.

I do, yeah, the compound effect.

There's Sean Stevenson who talks about it. There's Atomic Habits that talks about it. There's tons of the same type of books that I'll talk about. Just get in the right habits. Just make a slight change here. And over time, that compound effect grows exponentially. yep.

Justin Shelley (06:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Well, Mario, you wanted to go last. I guess I'll, I'll go here and then I'll let you, ⁓ give your lessons learned. this, listen, I swear to God, we didn't, ⁓ synchronize this stuff behind the scenes, but what my takeaway from last year was consistency in a word. And it's very similar to what you're saying. You're talking about improvements. And for me, it's just doing the same thing, getting into, you know, habits, rituals, whatever you want to call it. ⁓ this started honestly with.

fitness. I've let myself get very out of shape over the last few years because of a lot of stuff that's gone on in my life. and decided it was time to just get, get things back under control, ⁓ get back to running marathons and just being in good shape overall. ⁓ and it's, it's frustrating at first when you start doing this because you know, it just hurts and it's, you're just tired. So tired, you know, I'll go work out in the morning and the rest of the day I'm cooked. I, you know, as these young kids would say, I'm cooked.

And I can't do a damn thing the rest of the day. ⁓ but I just kept at it until, you know, weeks, several weeks, maybe a month or two. And then you start seeing those, those results and you get that payday and it's, it's, I love it. ⁓ the thing for me about fitness is it is always tied to business, not intentionally, but when I start getting myself in shape physically, I always get better at business. ⁓ I can't explain that.

Mario Zaki (07:52)
You

Justin Shelley (08:17)
⁓ Maybe it's just because I spend so much time on the treadmill and it's mind numbing. And so my brain goes in and solves all the business problems. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but as I've started doing that, all kinds of things have started coming together in other areas of life. So consistency is my key takeaway. It applies to fitness. It applies to business and definitely applies to cybersecurity because guys, we can't let our guards down for a minute. ⁓ Especially with all the AI and you know, the automation that's going on in the world of security.

It's getting scary out there. ⁓ so we have to up our game there. So that, that was my takeaway from 20, 25 Mario. I give you enough time to come up with a little way to present your findings?

Mario Zaki (08:56)
You did, you did. And

it's not that I'm trying to almost tie in your stuff, but mine is to stop going on autopilot. know, and I feel like, and I see it with myself, I see it with my technicians. Sometimes we go on autopilot, you where, you know, you stop thinking and analyzing situations yourself.

You get used to AI. And my biggest thing with 2025 is I realized AI is good, but it's not there. ⁓ It's good with putting some things together, but when you really wanted to analyze a problem, when you wanted to solve a issue for you,

Justin Shelley (09:36)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (09:49)
It's not there, you know, and sometimes you will waste or that I've wasted like hours trying to set up the right prompts, you know, screenshots, uploads and stuff like that. And then I realized I'm like, you know what, if I would have never opened up AI and would have actually tried some of the stuff myself, I think I wouldn't have been down this rabbit hole. I probably would have solved it myself. ⁓ you know, and it's happened so many times. It's just not.

there. and the thing is, I yell at my AI and I tell it, I'm like, why did you, you know, give me this information when it's not correct, you know, ⁓ quick little story. Last week was my wife's birthday and she wanted to have dinner at home. She wanted to have a fun due night. ⁓ we used to love like for special occasions, go to, ⁓ the melting pot, but the one that was closer to us closed down. So.

Justin Shelley (10:44)
Mmm, yeah.

Mario Zaki (10:49)
You know, we, we, you know, we've been there so many times. have the menu memorized and the ingredients memorized. And I was on the way to shop and I'm like, all right, you know, chat GPT put this, you know, we're looking to redo the Wisconsin trio from the melting pot. You know, do me a favor. I'm on my way to the supermarket, put together a checklist of ingredients that I need to buy. And it did, it did everything that I did.

I bought it, it was a three cheese, you know, trio. And I went home, you know, started and then my wife opens the refrigerator and she's like, what the hell are these cheeses? I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, this is for the Wisconsin trio. She's like, Mario, you know, this is not what's in there. What the hell kind of cheese is like all it got all three cheeses completely wrong. And then when I told it, I'm like, isn't it supposed to have blue cheese in there? She's like, Mario, you're absolutely right. Yes.

Bryan Lachapelle (11:40)
huh

Mario Zaki (11:46)
You know, it should have blue cheese. and then it did, it changed one of the three to blue cheese, but the other two were still wrong. And I told it, I'm like, but what about this one? She's like, you caught me. It's supposed to be this. And I'm like, I'm like, and I call mine Bertha and I'm like Bertha, what the fuck? You know, why are you giving me the wrong ingredients? And she's like, well, I was just giving you a generic ingredient. but I do remember you saying that it was from the melting pot. I'm like,

Justin Shelley (11:52)
You

Mario Zaki (12:16)
God damn it, if I would have just looked it up, you know, I, I, and now I don't have to go, you know, now I have to go back to the store, return these cheese, get other cheese, but either way, that's, that's, uh, that's where I've learned. Just kind of still don't go on autopilot. You still have to use your brain at least for 2026.

Justin Shelley (12:34)
Okay. But maybe

you've learned the wrong lesson, Mario. Maybe what you should have learned is how to treat your robot. Because it sounds to me like you guys have a bit of a toxic relationship. You're swearing at her. A, you've labeled her a female. So I don't know what that means. ⁓ And then you swear at her and then you piss her off. And then you wonder why you get bad information. I, ⁓ listen, my, ⁓ my girl, Liana, she's

She always fights with our, our, our Alexa, you know, and it's funny listening to them yell at each other, but Alexa started getting sassy. She's, she's pushing back now. And I'm like, yeah, you gotta knock that off. Like these robots are going to take over and you better be on their, on their good list. You don't want it. You don't want to be on the naughty list. So I don't know, Mario. ⁓ I'm just asking, maybe you should probably be a little bit nicer to your AI.

Mario Zaki (13:30)
Well,

you know, we talked to, we started talking about it in the beginning of the conversation. And, ⁓ you know, one thing I found out about chat GPT the other day is it doesn't know how to spell. so listen to this. So Bertha, you with me? Always hear, Maz. What's on your mind? Spill it. I'm listening. Bertha, how do you spell or sorry, start over Bertha. How many Rs are in the word strawberry?

Bryan Lachapelle (13:43)
⁓

Mario Zaki (14:00)
There are two Rs in the word strawberry, one right after the T and one near the end. Could you spell that out for me, please? Absolutely. It's spelled S T R A W B E R R Y. It sounds to me that you had three Rs in there.

what you're thinking. It can feel like a lot of letters, but there are still only two Rs total. One in the middle, one near the end. Strawberries might be sweeter, but they just add an E E S at the end. No extra R there. So you're sure. Final answer, there's only two Rs in strawberry. Final answer, absolutely. Just two Rs in strawberry, and that's all you need to make it sweet. All right, thank you.

Justin Shelley (14:48)
Listen,

like I tell people, well, like I tell people we here's the thing about AI. is dangerously good at intimidating human behavior. And we forget that it's nothing but math. And it's not math about how many hours are in strawberry. It's math just about statistics, probabilities. It has no awareness of what it's saying. ⁓ and you just proved that point and yeah, it is scary because we rely on it and we do think it's a human.

Mario Zaki (14:50)
Mic drop.

Bryan Lachapelle (14:51)
boy.

Mario Zaki (15:03)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (15:19)
my God, it's not. ⁓ so on that note, let's talk about what our crystal ball shows for 2026. And I'm going to jump right in because that's a perfect segue. Assuming you were done, Mario, did I, I didn't cut you off, right? Okay. Okay. ⁓ and meanwhile, while, while I'm talking about my crystal ball, I'd like you to go and his Bertha, is that her name? I'd like you to go, ⁓ issue an apology to her cause you've been kind of rude. so my crystal ball.

Bryan Lachapelle (15:27)
⁓

Mario Zaki (15:33)
I'm done, I'm done, I'm good, thank you.

Birth, yes.

Justin Shelley (15:49)
says that, ⁓ you know what guys, this is a first on the show. I completely blamed on what I was going to say. I did well. Okay. So I, I, I, what I did is I jumped tracks because we had a guest that was supposed to be actually on last week. One of the other reasons that's been so long since we talked and, and she started asking me about agentic AI and was I afraid of it? And, I said, well,

let me ask you in, in your, you know, you look into your crystal ball, you know, you brought this up. What does our world look like? Cause she's kind of presenting this dystopian society model of what is going to happen as AI becomes a gentic AI and becomes, you know, the really doing everything for us right now. It's a tool, it's a crutch, but it's getting to where it is going to start doing everything. ⁓ And it kind of caught her in her tracks. She's like, that's a

Great question. I'll have to go think about that one. ⁓ So hopefully we come back to that conversation. We talk about the dystopian AI future. ⁓ here's, okay, so I gave myself enough time to realize what I was going to say as AI allows us to do more and more things. ⁓ And I'll use myself as the example, because I love to code. I, know, when I was a kid, that's the first thing I did with technology is started writing programs on my Apple two E. I played piano at the time. My first program or well, one of my early programs.

was the song, the entertainer by Scott Joplin. And I programmed my computer to play that song just with beeps. All it didn't have real sound cards back then. It was just a little goddamn speaker on your, you know, plastic welded, you know, they melt the plastic in to hold it in place and, it just could be in pitches and duration. That's all I had to work with. had two numbers, a pitch and a duration. And I programmed the entertainer by Scott Joplin. So proud of that. Anyways, I've been, I've

always loved to write code as I got older and tried to make money with it. You know, it's complicated and it takes forever. And even then, ⁓ it's usually wrong. And so I, I never found a way to do it professionally. I didn't want to work for somebody else and a one man, ⁓ development team. It just isn't, isn't practical. said AI is letting me get back into that world. And as I've started developing again,

One of the things that scares me, one of the things that I'm worried about for 2026 is more and more people are going to have access to do this type of thing. And we're talking about security. my God. Like the, the security holes that we can inadvertently put into code that now we tie into our best data, our most, you know, tightly held controlled information about clients, about financials, about everything else.

⁓ that's really got my attention, ⁓ as I'm developing, I'm like, yeah, I can't put too much trust in this. ⁓ so that's my crystal ball. Do you guys have any thoughts on that one?

Mario Zaki (18:51)
No, I agree. mean, you have to, you have to kind of still, you know, you need to use AI as a tool, not the driving force, you know, I think it needs to assist you in your mission, not just, you know, give you a ride to where you want to be. You know, does that make sense?

Justin Shelley (19:10)
Okay.

Brian, what are your thoughts?

Bryan Lachapelle (19:12)
Sounds like you're saying

don't make your AI your CEO of your company. ⁓ Yeah, mean, guardrails are important. If you put guardrails up surrounding what you're doing with AI, and that might mean many different things to different people, but it all comes down to making sure that, to me anyway, is there's human intervention between anything AI and anything major happening in your organization, right? So.

Mario Zaki (19:16)
You

Bryan Lachapelle (19:39)
We're talking about automating a whole bunch of things. And automation isn't exactly AI, but the two are kind of melding and merging together. ⁓ There's AI being used in automation quite frequently. ⁓ But any time there's something important that's supposed to happen, maybe you're taking an order using AI on a phone, before the order actually goes out, it should be reviewed by an actual human being. Like this is what the person actually wanted to have versus it just being automated and going through. ⁓

doing anything critical with AI, you have a human being in between the input and the output. And I think that's a good guardrail to have.

Justin Shelley (20:18)
Yeah. All right. Next up, Brian, you got, you got your crystal ball out and tell us what yours says. I, maybe you've got an updated firmware and you have better information than I have.

Bryan Lachapelle (20:30)
Well, I just have a faster CPU, so I'm able to process them much, much quicker. You know, there's younger and I've got still hair on my head. some of this is, some of this is helping with the processing. ⁓ yeah. Okay, listen, we've been dealing with logins and passwords for as long as time, you know, as long as we've had computers, there's been logins and passwords, right?

Justin Shelley (20:32)
Okay. ⁓ shit. Damn, Brian. Shots fired. Shots fired.

Mario Zaki (20:40)
That's coming off this year. That's what my crystal,

my crystal ball says he's gonna, we're gonna cut off his hair this in 2026.

Justin Shelley (20:47)
Initiation coming.

Yeah.

Bryan Lachapelle (20:58)
I was going to say as long as the time was around, but no, mean, we've only had logins and passwords for, well, anyway, let's just say the last 40, 50 years. ⁓ And we're at a point now where hackers are getting very clever and stealing credentials. I think pass keys in 2026 will become more of a thing. And I say that because even I kind of avoided it in 2025. And now in 2026, I'm embracing it in almost every website that supports pass keys. I've been using it. ⁓

And so I think, think Paschis will become something that is far more prevalent in 2026 and many more people will start using them. Many more websites will start implementing them. And overall, I think it will make our logins to all the different websites and computers and systems and tools that we use much more secure.

Justin Shelley (21:46)
I'm going to, well, a, I'm going to say that we've been using passwords way more than 50 years. ⁓ We've had secret handshakes and you know, what, what's the open sesame from, I don't write like this has gone. Yeah. Like this has gone back centuries, millennia, whatever. And probably since the beginning of time. ⁓ That said, I, I love the passkey concept.

Bryan Lachapelle (21:51)
Okay.

Right.

Aladdin? I don't know.

Sure.

Okay.

Justin Shelley (22:14)
And I've also already been frustrated with it. So hopefully they come up with some new iterations that makes it more useful. One of the websites that I switched to a passkey on now I get stuck in a loop when I try to log in. ⁓ you know, it's like thumb print because it's, I'll let you describe, I'm going to, I'm going to make you tell us all in layman's terms, what a passkey is. ⁓ but it does, it requires usually some kind of a biological.

thumb print, a face recognition, or something like that to authenticate the passkey. Right. And as I implemented this on the trite, I do it and it likes, okay, we've got to sign you in. And then it just pushes me right back out. And then it just loops and I have to do that like four or five times. And sometimes I have to close the app and start back over, drives me nuts. So, great concept moving in the right direction for security. ⁓ we're still in its infancy, but tell us Brian, what is a passkey?

know, how can I understand? I know what a password is. Like I said, those have been around for thousands of years. What is this thing?

Bryan Lachapelle (23:15)
Yeah.

Okay, so the long and short of it is when you first sign up to a website, you have a tool, typically your phone and or a password manager ⁓ that will, the website will communicate with and they'll exchange tokens. So exchange information, let's just leave it at that. And what happens is every single time you log into the website or you try to go to the website and log in, you're not using your password anymore. The website will send a one time challenge.

It's like a random question that changes every time you try to log in. It sends a one-time challenge that your computer then has to answer correctly in order to log in. So every time you go to log in, it'll be a different challenge. And this is layman's terms, like really, really, really easy. So really, an easy way to do an analogy would be like, it's like a bouncer saying today's secret word is pineapple. And then you've got to reply with whatever the reply to that is. And tomorrow will be something different. It's that same analogy.

⁓ And the reason why this is a lot better than the login and password, of course, is that a login and password is static. It's always the same every single time. And so ⁓ an attacker could be listening in or watching over your shoulder or however they're in between and they can record your login and password. And if they have that, even if you have 2FA, sometimes they can bypass it, but they can log into your account. Now with the...

key because it changes all the time every single time that the challenge is different it's very very unlikely that that challenge question will come back again that the attacker could then use that to log into the website so it makes it infinitely more secure

Justin Shelley (24:56)
Okay. And can you tell me why it loops? ⁓ Mario, ⁓ what's your crystal ball showing for 26?

Bryan Lachapelle (25:00)
No. That I can't answer.

Mario Zaki (25:07)
⁓

that I think your problem is between the chair and the keyboard.

Justin Shelley (25:11)
⁓ guys, guys, why? Why are we attacking Justin today? my God. What

Bryan Lachapelle (25:12)
Another ID10 tier.

Justin Shelley (25:20)
did I do to piss you guys off?

Bryan Lachapelle (25:20)
I don't know,

it probably has a lot to do with the fact that...

Justin Shelley (25:25)
What? Say it, Brian. You're not, not everybody's got video. You're pointing at your hair, but, yeah, Brian loves his luscious locks.

Bryan Lachapelle (25:27)
That you have no hair. I'm just kidding.

Ahaha!

Mario Zaki (25:35)
I know, I think we have to check, go back to a couple episodes before. I do think his hair used to be a little thicker last year. ⁓ I don't know.

Bryan Lachapelle (25:41)
Uh oh, uh oh.

Justin Shelley (25:43)
⁓ shit. That's

the, that's the crystal ball for Brian this year is he's going bald. Join the ranks, join the ranks. All right, Mario, Brian, I'm going to mute you real quick. Mario, go ahead and tell us what in the world of technology is going to happen in 26.

Mario Zaki (25:48)
you

So.

So I do think, and we are kind of seeing it a little bit, do think AI is going to kind of start narrowing down a little bit. know, the different companies out there, different, you know, platforms ⁓ is going to start coming together into less platforms. We're seeing it with the iPhone. ⁓ Apple, I think a week or two announced that they have given up on trying to have their own AI.

And it's actually going to the, their competitor Google and they're integrating Gemini right into every iPhone and Siri is going to actually be run through Gemini. ⁓ so they, they did announce that about, you know, I think it was about two weeks ago. So I do start thinking, I do think that it's going to, ⁓ start merging somehow, you know, like before the show we were talking about.

you know, chat GPT and you're saying that you were going to, Justin, you said you were going to start using Claude and you know, I know some people using, you know, ⁓ Gemini directly and, know, Microsoft pilot. I think eventually a lot of this stuff is going to start merging together and, and, and joining and growing as one. ⁓ that's my, that's what I think we're going to see a lot of in 2026.

Justin Shelley (27:28)
mean, kind of like the dot com bubble, right? Everything exploded and then it consolidated. And I think that's going to happen here. It's happens generally speaking, anytime something new hits. So I do have a question though, along those lines, you're bringing up Apple and how it's going to maybe we'll call it standardizing a little bit with AI is it's not going to do his own thing. Do you think there's any chance they're going to stop turning my damn messages green and pissing off everybody else in the group chat?

Bryan Lachapelle (27:29)
lot of consolidation. ⁓

Mario Zaki (27:55)
No, that's what they're hanging their hat on. I am, I'll tell you this sometime in Q1, I will be joining you and Brian and making the switch from Apple to Android.

Bryan Lachapelle (27:55)
No. Yeah.

Justin Shelley (28:11)
⁓ tell me more. Why? What happened? What? Why did Apple fall from your graces?

Mario Zaki (28:18)
I've been waiting and any person out there that knows, you know, that has an iPhone, you know, knows that we've been waiting forever to try to catch up with Samsung. We, I want a folding phone and I like, you know, a couple of my friends that have Samsung, you know, they, it's pretty. Apple finally decided that they're going to join the, the

Justin Shelley (28:29)
Mm.

⁓ okay, okay.

You

Mario Zaki (28:47)
folding world in some time at the end of the year, but they're full. They're, they're coming out with like, what's they're calling the passport size. So it's like much smaller than like, you know, like I have the, the iPhone pro max. I like the big screen. ⁓ they're shrinking it and they're just pretty much having it open sideways. And that kind of annoyed me and Samsung is coming out with the trifold and this is not a commercial for Samsung.

Bryan Lachapelle (29:15)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (29:16)
What?

Mario Zaki (29:17)
⁓ Where it's gonna open up to an at 10 inch tablet ⁓ You know, I don't know if you guys know but I like technology and I like playing with toys like this so ⁓ I am going to be making the switch once it comes out

Justin Shelley (29:21)
my God.

This is, this is blasphemous depending on which, ⁓ groups you run in. ⁓ if you were in my house, you'd get thrown out the window. ⁓ I am, I am not popular around here because of my green messages. Just going to say, so, my God, I've got my, my two.

Mario Zaki (29:36)
Ha ha ha ha ha

Ha

Bryan Lachapelle (29:49)
Same, everybody in my family uses Apple except for me.

Mario Zaki (29:53)
Alright, I mean my wife

has been cursing at me ever since I pretty much told her this like a few weeks ago. So, you know, she's sending me... No, she's not happy. She's sending me these bullshit like, you know, Samsung like, you know, durability tests. People throwing it off like the third floor building. It's like, look, it broke when he threw it off the building. Like, no shit. You know, like go do that with your iPhone. Let's see if it survives, you know.

Justin Shelley (30:00)
So she's not... ⁓

good times.

Mario Zaki (30:23)
but she's not happy. So it's good to know that you guys are in very similar situations. So.

Justin Shelley (30:29)
Yeah. I mean, what I'll tell you, what Apple does really well is divide starts wars, makes people hate each other. That's what Apple's good at.

Bryan Lachapelle (30:37)
Well, I would argue that they like taking technology that already exists and then telling their Apple users that, what we came up with two years later.

Justin Shelley (30:44)
And look how much better it is

and, how much more secure it is. yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's only like 30 % higher than the rest of the market. All right, guys, what else do we have as far as a 25 review, 26 outlook? I think we've kind of wrapped it up pretty good, but if you have any final thoughts, this is your last chance.

Bryan Lachapelle (30:48)
Yeah. ⁓

Mario Zaki (30:49)
And we'll sell you the same thing again next year as well.

Yeah, I mean, one thing I, you know, like I was saying, people are kind of going on autopilot. You still have to, you know, want to, you know, bring it to security, you know, you still, you know, you still need to keep an eye out, you know, you still need to, you can't assume that your spam filter is going to work a hundred percent of the time. Don't just click, you know, things that you don't think you're supposed to be clicking on. You still need to do training and.

Justin Shelley (31:20)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (31:37)
and you still need to keep learning. You can't think that the world around you is just gonna be automated and AI is taking over and you don't need to think anymore. At least for 26, that's not the case right now. 27, maybe. You could stop thinking and maybe in 27.

Justin Shelley (31:57)
Okay. I'm putting that on my calendar because I am tired of thinking quite frankly,

Brian, what your final.

Bryan Lachapelle (32:04)
Final thoughts, just like in business, the basics are what matter. When it comes to cybersecurity, the basics are what matter. So in business, we have to make sure we have good sales and marketing. We have to make sure we got good financial controls. We have to make sure we have a good product and good customer service. If you have those four core basic things, most businesses will survive and most businesses will thrive. Cybersecurity is the same way. If you do the basics,

Justin Shelley (32:11)
Yeah.

Bryan Lachapelle (32:31)
which we've talked about many times, so I'm not going to rehash it all up. But if you start with the basics, and you'll be much better off than 90 percent of the people out there. Ninety percent of the businesses will be low-hanging fruit and you'll be a higher up that tree.

Justin Shelley (32:49)
Good call. All right. Well guys, I'm, I'd be honest. I've said what I have to say this, ⁓ consistency though, you know, that's, I said that because we, took almost two months off and it was not on purpose. I will admit that I don't like to admit that, but I will, ⁓ we, we won't be doing that again. We're gonna, we're gonna get down to business here. So, ⁓ Mario and Brian, both you, I appreciate you being here week after week in, ⁓

loaning me your brain. This podcast is much better for having you on it. I know that because I tried to do it alone at first. ⁓ No, boy, no. So thank you both for being here. And ⁓ with that, we're going to go ahead and wrap up guys, go to unhackmybusiness.com for show notes, for past episodes, for resources and all that good stuff. ⁓ Let's go ahead and say our goodbyes, Brian.

Bryan Lachapelle (33:42)
⁓ Well, ⁓ geez, can't even remember my sign-off. ⁓

Justin Shelley (33:48)
⁓ It's a journey, improve a little bit every day. mean, Jesus Christ, Brian, everybody else knows your sign off.

Mario Zaki (33:48)
1 %

Bryan Lachapelle (33:50)
right. Yeah. I know.

know. Allow us to be part of your journey ⁓ in everything IT. ⁓ Come join us. We'll be your guide and help you through the journey of getting 1 % better every day.

Mario Zaki (34:10)
You know, the world is stressful enough on its own. ⁓ Let us help you guys sleep better at night. You know, let us take something off your plate, you know, and to be your partners in the cybersecurity journey.

Justin Shelley (34:27)
All right. That's it guys. I'm Justin Shelley. Remember, listen in, take action and you keep your business on hacked. We'll see you next week. Take care.

Mario Zaki (34:36)
Peace.

Bryan Lachapelle (34:37)
Peace.