Cyber Hygiene Without Fear: Building a Security Culture People Actually Like (with Lynn Soeth)

Fear-based cybersecurity training uses the same tactics as cybercriminals. And it's not working.

Lynn Soeth, Service Manager of Security Services and Sales Engineering at High Point Networks, has been leading security teams since 2017 with a distinctly human-first approach. In this episode, she breaks down what it actually looks like to build a security culture people want to participate in — not one they dread.

From the Little Mermaid as a metaphor for layered security, to a real-world email spoof that nearly cost HPN 60 laptops, to practical tips for making cybersecurity month something your team looks forward to — this episode is packed with stories and strategies any organization can act on.

✨ In this episode:

→ The five pillars of a positive security culture — more carrot, less stick

→ Why security starts at the top and what happens when leadership opts out

→ The Little Mermaid and layers of security — a perfect analogy for how protection actually works

→ Tabletop exercises — what they are, how to run them, and why your team needs one

→ The Nick story — a real email spoof that almost shipped 60 laptops to a sketchy house in New York

→ What cybersecurity month looks like at HPN and how to replicate it

→ One piece of advice for IT leaders and one for everyone else

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Connect with Lynn: ✉️ lynn.soeth@highpointnetworks.com

Resources mentioned: 🌐 CISA cybersecurity resources — cisa.gov

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🕑 Timestamps:

0:00 - Cold open: "Why does cybersecurity feel like a scare tactic?" 

0:51 - Welcome & Lynn Soeth introduction 

2:21 - Today's topic: building a security culture without fear 

3:46 - Lynn's five pillars of a positive security culture 

6:01 - Why fear-based training backfires — and what to do instead 

8:50 - The Little Mermaid and layers of security 

13:23 - Brandi's question: how do you actually make cyber hygiene fun? 

17:24 - Security starts at the top — and it's contagious 

18:59 - Tabletop exercises — what they are and why they matter 

21:40 - The Nick story — a real email spoof at HPN 

25:55 - What cybersecurity month looks like in practice 

31:09 - Final advice for IT leaders and everyone else 

32:20 - Where to find Lynn & closing thoughts

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New episodes every other Wednesday.

Connect with us: 🌐 highpointnetworks.com 📱 LinkedIn, Instagram & Facebook: @highpointnetworks

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Get to the Point is produced by High Point Networks for informational purposes only. Guests include High Point Networks professionals as well as subject matter experts from across the industry, each speaking from their own experience and expertise. Content shared is intended as general information and should be evaluated within the context of your specific organization and circumstances. Views expressed by outside guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of High Point Networks or its affiliates. High Point Networks assumes no liability for decisions or actions taken based on content discussed in this podcast.

Transcript

Andy: 0:00

Brandi, let's start off today with a question. I'll just toss it out there into the universe. So why does every conversation about cybersecurity feel like, like a scare tactic?

Brandi: 0:16

Right? It's either click this and you're doomed, or it's another mandatory training that everyone dreads.

Andy: 0:23

That is so true. And you know, somewhere in all of that, we tend to lose sight of the fact that cybersecurity at the end of the day is really about people.

Brandi: 0:36

Absolutely. You know, that's why today we're getting to the point of what cyber hygiene actually looks like without fear and how to build a security culture your team doesn't secretly hate. This is.

Andy: 0:50

Get to the Point Welcome to, uh, Get to the Point Podcast. Uh, it's the podcast where we chat with real IT, uh, experts about real IT stuff, and we try to dig in deeper to the why behind the tech that's all around us. We try to make it a little bit more human. I'm Andy Middlemiss. And I'm Brandi Mentele. Today we are joined by Lynn Soeth, Service Manager of Security Services and Sales Engineering at High Point Networks. Lynn has been leading security teams since 2017. Uh, she's been a passionate advocate for comprehend. Security hygiene. She emphasizes the importance of security planning, education, incident simulation, internal security assessments, and remediation, approaching it all as a holistic practice to strengthen overall security. Thank you for being here, Lynn. Tell me something good.

Lynn: 1:52

Good morning everyone, or afternoon, depending on when you're listening to this podcast, I guess. something good. Hey, the sun is shining today. Blue sky, just little puffy clouds. Absolutely loving it. Um, it just brightens your day and makes you feel better.

Brandi: 2:09

I love it. Yeah. The folks like us that are in the Midwest, we know how much of a gift it is when the sun is shining and there are little puffy clouds out by the way.

Andy: 2:18

A good weather day is a good day. We'll take it. So today we're getting to the point of what it takes to create a security culture that people actually like. Again, it's about the people. And without using, you know, fear tactics and scare tactics. So that's what we're gonna focus on today.

Brandi: 2:38

You know, Andy, you bring that up. Fear tactics and, and we've talked about it. I, I've thought about this. I mean, I, I know why people do it, right? I get it. Cybersecurity is serious, but here's the problem. Fear tactics make people panic and act out of their norm. That's exactly what cyber criminals use. They use the same scare tactics to trick people in to making snap decisions instead of pausing and thinking. Lynn, this has, you have always been a standout as far as just the holistic approach to cybersecurity. As long as I've known you, even one of the first conversations I ever had with you completely changed my thought process about security, because even in that first conversation, one of the sentences that you said was, security isn't about buying a product. It isn't about just one singular thing. You've always emphasized, you know, just security in general is more than a technical service. It's an entire culture. Can you share with us why this approach to cybersecurity has become something that you are so passionate and so, so good at, lynn?

Lynn: 3:46

I can, it really comes at you from five different fronts. And Andy, you hit it on the head. It is all about the people. Yes, we have to have the tools. Yes, we have to have the processes to keep us safe, but in the end, it's the people. And so if you do five things with your people, you're building a positive security culture more the carrot, rather than the stick, right? So you need to let people know, security belongs to everyone. Everyone owns a piece of the company's security. If something looks wrong, say something. If somebody is doing something positive, say something. Uh, but security does belong to everyone. And if you focus on that awareness for today and beyond, you build a sustainable security culture within the company that's positive. You empower employees to do the right thing. In order to do the right thing, they have to know what the right thing is. So you write policies and you share those policies with people and make sure that they know what the right thing is to do. You create a person or a team or someone that they feel comfortable talking to. So if they think they clicked a link, if they think they might have done something that may harm the company, they feel comfortable going to someone and explaining that, and they, they don't feel that they will be punished for that particular act. you wanna reward and recognize people that are doing the right thing. When we do that at High Point, especially during October Cybersecurity Month, where we have some games that go on, give away some gift cards, give away some prizes, have some competitions around security, make it fun and reward them. You wanna make it fun and engaging. Again, the gaming, yes, we all know that we gotta watch that boring video once a month that's going to train us on something that we all think we already know. But what if we go find a gamified version of that somewhere? There are plenty of them out there on the network, just have to go searching for him.

Andy: 5:57

I love that. Lemme let me come back to something. That Brandi said early on here about the fear tactics and this, you know, this false sense of urgency and the, "oh my God, it's something bad's gonna happen if I don't take action." And, you know, it's, it's all of those tactics that the, bad people who are trying to, uh, get into our stuff or steal our information or whatever the case may be, they're using those tactics to, to give us this heightened sense of, "oh my God, something bad's gonna happen." I need to take action right now. It's interesting what that does to your brain. It kind of gives you a little shot of epinephrine and it, it really shuts down the rational thinking part of your brain to some degree. So it occurs to us that a lot of cyber training kind of sometimes takes the same approach, and I, I, my fear is it kind of gets lost in the clutter, right? If we're using the same tactics as the bad guys to scare people into, oh my God, something's bad's gonna happen if you don't comply to this, or whatever the case may be. If you kind of tie that together with sort of the opening comments around creating a culture around security that's fun, that people actually want to participate in and like, it doesn't have that same effect of, oh, I, I, I can't think rationally right now 'cause I gotta do this right now. Make it engaging, make it fun. And again, to your point, I think it's, if you can create a culture where people just want to participate in that, and they like to participate in that. It's just a, it's a game changer. So any kind, any following commentary to that? I think you kind of already spoke to it. the things that we do to make it fun, it's important. People forget that.

Lynn: 7:43

it is, and it's a culture. And cultures don't shift day one. Cultures shift over a period of time. So you have to continually repeat this process over and over so that people start to trust your culture and trust what you're saying. and at one point, Andy, I, I do agree using the same tactics to try to scare someone with a training video really doesn't work. We do need to know about these tactics though, because statistics show that if you know about a scam, you are 80% less likely to be falling into that scam. So we need to know education is very important, but you're right. How we deliver it is just as important.

Andy: 8:24

Yeah, delivery is super, super important. I, read something in the notes here and I'm, I'm super curious about where this is gonna go. So something about a Little Mermaid story and how this relates to cybersecurity, and I don't, I'm anxious to try and get my head around this. So tell us the story about the Little Mermaid and cybersecurity.

Lynn: 8:50

I do have a story about the Little Mermaid and cybersecurity and my granddaughter, the first Little Mermaid came out when my daughter was little, so we grew up watching Little Mermaid on Disney. It was great when they came out with the live action remake of The Little Mermaid. My daughter took my granddaughter to see it in the movie theater, first movie she had ever gone to in a theater. Enjoyed it. That was great. Well then Little Mermaid came out on Disney Plus, so I can watch it on my tv, right. My granddaughter was there for the weekend and I said, let's watch Little Mermaid together. Oh. She said, "we can't until the Ursula scary part." And I said, "Ursula, scary part?" "Yes. Yes. I don't wanna watch that again." And Ursula, if you are aware, is like an octopus type character. Very large, booming voice. And in the scary part, she's negotiating with Ariel to turn Ariel Mermaid into Ariel humans, so she can go after her Prince, of course. And in exchange, Ursula gets Ariel's voice. So I said, well, what was so big and scary about it? And she said, "she's loud and she's scary. She's big." And I said, well, I have a smaller TV than the big movie theater, so she won't be as big. "Oh yeah." That was cool. And I said, "I'll give you the remote control. You can turn the volume down if she gets too loud." "Oh yeah, that would work." And she said, "I can get my stuffies and I'll put them all around me so that I can keep them safe." I thought that was a perfect idea and she said, "I can put a pillow in front of me in case it gets too scary." "Absolutely. You can." "I can use a blanket and hide under it if I want to." "You sure can, harper!" And I said the other thing is "you can plug your ears if she gets too loud." Perfect. We were able to watch The Little Mermaid and as we thought, as we sat there, I thought. She just did security in layers, which is exactly what we need to do as a company. So smaller, Ursula is smaller on my tv. That's your next generation firewall. We keep the rest of the world out and we narrow it down to just what we want to be able to see and what's good for us. Remote control to control the sound? We have email security measures. We keep all that spam stuff out. We keep away all of the noise of the malicious activity and the malicious links. So we just really control good things that come into our email inbox. Stuffies around her so she can protect them? We have policies in place for everyone's safety. Everyone needs to know that they're protected and how they're protected, so the policies will tell us how to do that. Pillow in front gonna protect me? Our endpoint protection, we need antivirus on our computers, and and other things that help keep us safe. And the endpoint just before a malicious activity. We get to us blanket for hiding? We do GOIP blocking, so that Russia can't find us. Russia can't send us bad emails and whatever location in the country is also now trying to focus on us. We can simply hide underneath our blanket and not, not take any of their issues. And the ability to plug her ears? In the end, users are all responsible for themselves. You have to watch for suspicious behavior. Watch for malicious activity. It's up to you to help keep everybody safe. So again, it all comes down to the person.

Andy: 12:47

I love that. Fun, fun story, great illustration of layers of security. Very cool. Yeah. You know, people get hung up on thinking, "Hey, security is a product, or security is a solution." It's really a kind of a philosophy and a culture and a thought process. And I, I love, I love that example, Little Mermaid. I will never think of Little Mermaid in the same way again.

Lynn: 13:13

Right.

Brandi: 13:14

Same. Same. That was a great story. And I was like, Andy, like how is this gonna relate? And yeah. beautiful story. I love it. You know, for our listeners out there, Lynn, you talk about, you know this culture, you know how on earth can they make cyber hygiene fun? And why does it even matter? what would you say to those people out there? You know, the IT leaders just trying to do their best. You know, how on earth can I make it fun? And why? Why should— this is cybersecurity. It's serious. Why does it even matter if we do or not?

Lynn: 13:47

Again, you go back to that culture, right? If you don't create a culture of fun or wanting to engage in cybersecurity, you're just fighting it all the time. Um, there are plenty of things out there. There are organizations. cisa.org is a great place to go. They provide you with cybersecurity materials that you can use. they run the October is cybersecurity Awareness month, and again, provide you with games, tools, tips, tricks. A few gift cards go a very long way for boosting morale and making security engaging. we like to run a little competition. Sometimes you can run competitions with, um, phishing campaigns. We're gonna send you four phishing campaigns in October. If you get all the way through them, you are entered into a drawing for a gift certificate. If you don't, if you click a link, I'm sorry, no longer in the drawing. exactly, Andy, out you go. So little things like that. Again, gamification hits Some people do like those training movies, and that's how they engage in security. That's how they hear, that's how they learn. Some people learn from emails and messages or bulleted lists or whatever, you have to deliver it in a variety of different ways so that you hit the person where they like to get their communication.

Brandi: 15:08

I love that. I,

Andy: 15:10

go ahead.

Brandi: 15:11

Yeah. We all learn so differently. I love that so much because you're right. What, what might work for me might not work for Andy and vice versa, so I love that. It is not only this consistency over time, but it's a different way to see something over time too, so that you start recognizing the different avenues that things can come, the different messages, the different— I just love that approach so much because it is just a hundred percent spot on.

Andy: 15:44

Yeah, just, just another kind of, from a, a leadership standpoint, I think it's really important to make sure that this culture of participation, this, um, this culture of trust, um, you know, goes, all the way through the organization because people are very, very hesitant at first if they do something wrong, you know, it's like, "oh, I better, try and hide that maybe, right?" If we don't have, we don't have a culture of trust, and if we can recognize and celebrate people who maybe make a mistake. but really take quick action to correct that. I think it, it just helps us develop more trust across the organization. And an organization that's trusting from top to bottom is gonna be way less susceptible to something really bad happening than somebody who's, people operating in their, their little quiet coroners trying to, you know, trying to hide because they're embarrassed because they did something wrong.

Lynn: 16:44

Oh, very true, Andy. And that's why you have to create that culture of trust, that somebody will report that. And you also tapped on another thing. It is so important that security starts at the top. Oftentimes we see CEOs, CFOs, the the C-Suite go, "oh, that's for everyone else. I'm good. I get it. I don't need to do these trainings." And that culture will permeate down. But if your leaders are participating and making you feel safe in reporting things, that culture will also bubble down.

Andy: 17:19

Whatever you've got, it's contagious, right?

Lynn: 17:22

It is. Yep.

Andy: 17:23

So there you go. and just, one other thing, uh, I'm taking a little bit of a left turn here, but I think maybe I'll, maybe it'll tie some of this together. So back to it's, about people. There's obviously technology, there's obviously solutions. That we've got to deploy in these layers, the Little Mermaid layers. I'm gonna refer to it that way from now on. But again, it's, it's, about the people. And I'm, I'm gonna a little affirmation for you, Lynn. I've heard from numerous customers that this taking this people approach. And one thing in particular, I'll highlight here, and maybe you can just talk about it a little bit. It's not technology. Tabletop exercises. Our customers, customers love that. And people just don't think of taking the time to do that because it's all of the human element stuff and all of the process stuff, it's everything outside of the technology that man, if you can do that right, and just like anything else, if you practice, you're gonna get better. So talk to us about this whole concept of tabletop exercises where you see value in that and how, how do you think that just reinforces the overall approach to cybersecurity for a company?

Lynn: 18:39

It most certainly does. Uh, it comes in the testing phase, right? So security is, is a cycle. First, you have to plan. Then you have to, to um, find every vulnerability you have, fix all of those things, and now you're ready to test. Whether that's a penetration test, a phishing test, or a tabletop exercise is a test of your policies and procedures that you have in case you have a bad day. And so we walk through a scenario. Stepping through, setting it up first, and each person around the table that's involved then says, okay, this part of the scenario, this is what I and my team would be doing. And as the scenario gets larger, you start to assess, do they know where to go to get additional resources to help them? Is that we need to talk about internal resources. Do you have third party external resources, like High Point might be able to come and help. Um, and then we walk through incidents that would go along within the scenario and you continue to talk about what your team would be doing at the time, and you identify gaps then, so you can easily go back and then fix the gaps that you have identified in this scenario. So if you do happen to have a bad day, which we don't want you to, but you've already run through this, once you're confident you can do it again in a real world situation,

Andy: 20:06

I assume you walk away with some sort of a kind of a playbook that, typically that's what you'd want to have. So it's like, "Hey, we're having a bad day. Grab the playbook."

Lynn: 20:14

Yep, exactly. You need a framework first though. So you need, who's gonna be our incident commander? Who is going to be in charge of the actual operations of fixing this? who's going to be in charge of making cyber insurance decisions, whether we call the insurance company, whether we pay a ransom, who's our finance person? And then you need to define who your logistics person is, and that person helps everyone else. Make sure that they've got what they, need, right? We're working through this until 8, 9, 10 o'clock at night. Did anybody get these guys pizza? Because they're getting hangry now. Um, we need water. We need a conference room table. The logistics person takes care of that. So once you have that framework built out, each person in that slot, the incident commander, operations chief logistics person, they write their own playbook. So that they bring the details, the day-to-day details to what's going on.

Andy: 21:11

Very cool.

Brandi: 21:12

Cool.

Andy: 21:13

Great process.

Brandi: 21:13

Yeah. Lynn, you know, let's, let's go back to the safe security culture, right? There's so many different parts of a safe security culture, and I know you have a story of one of our team members who didn't necessarily click on something, but he was involved in something. So I know that's a couple questions that I'm, I'm just throwing at you right now. But can you tell us like what an actual safe security culture looks like? If, if there's different parts of that, and then kind of tell us the story. I'm so interested in this story as well.

Lynn: 21:40

I'm gonna flip that on you. I'm gonna tell you this first, Brandi, um, I love it. We have a wonderful guy in procurement named Nick, and he, he is a fantastic person. I really

Brandi: 21:51

love Nick.

Lynn: 21:51

Yes. And so Nick communicates with one of our vendors daily, multiple times a day, often to get things ordered for our customers. So it's not unusual for Nick to send an email to this vendor. Nick's email got spoofed, and the spoofed email emailed the vendor and said, "Hey, this is Nick. I need a quote for 30 laptops." There were several red flags in that email. His signature wasn't right. Um, it came from not our email address, but a spoofed High Point email address with a few extra characters in there. this vendor's internal email system tried to alert them. It gave them the little note. You don't usually get emails from this email address, are you sure you want to open this email? So they tried, people get busy. They get tired, they have a bad day, whatever. He clicked the email, opened it up, 30 laptops. "Hey, yes, here's your quote for 30 laptops," and of course, emailed bit back to the spoofed email. Email then sends, "here's the PO for 30 laptops." Six days later, our head of procurement, got an automated email message from the vendor that said, "your 30 laptops are being shipped today." She was thoughtful enough to forward that to Nick and Nick said I didn't order 30 laptops. By the time they got ahold of the vendor, those laptops were actually out on the warehouse shipping dock ready to go, and they were going to ship to this quite sketchy looking house in New York with a broken down fence and a door. That's kind of a jar. but they were able to claw those 30 laptops back, credit High Point for the invoice that had already gone out. And in the meantime, also realized that 30 more laptops had been ordered that exact same way and were trying to be shipped to Dallas. So they almost got 60 laptops on HPN's dime.

Andy: 24:06

Crazy.

Lynn: 24:07

If we had not had that secure culture. Nick felt comfortable enough brought this story to me. Meghan saw something a little strange, double checked with Nick, which is what we want people to do. And so that all worked. So Nick didn't get phished, but he was certainly involved in the fishing.

Brandi: 24:29

Poor innocent Nick. That actually kind of makes me a little sad 'cause he's like the nicest person on earth. This poor guy shipped me some laptops. I love it. what a great story. Uh, yeah, I mean, safe security culture. Tell us what that looks like, Lynn.

Lynn: 24:42

Positive energy. People able to report to someone that they trust, even if they feel that they've done the wrong thing. Double check. If you're not sure, pick up the phone and call someone. Wire transfers especially need to have a process in place. You can't just email me and say, do a wire transfer. We have a phone call. Have some multi-step processes in place so that you just make sure that you're doing the right thing.

Brandi: 25:11

I love it.

Andy: 25:12

Outstanding. What else do we have? Any other topics? Did we hit it all? I think we did a pretty good job.

Brandi: 25:18

Yeah. Well, I, I think maybe give our listeners something of like, what does this look like in practice? Like I know that, I mean, I've been a part of the, you know, the cybersecurity month and just the fun that is in that, and just some of the different pieces of information that you guys send out definitely helps me in, in just being more aware. And I know that we don't just do that in October. That's more of a set aside fun, you know, everybody's thinking about it then, I mean, I, I understand that this is a 12 month all the time right, situation, but can you tell us like what is High Points, what does that look like? What does that security culture without fear look like in action for team members?

Lynn: 26:05

Lemme give you a story before the security culture was in action. Um, and I think this kind of will help explain that. So I actually was working in Highpoints, west Fargo main headquarters office and happened to be. I happened to be standing outside my door and visiting with someone with a coworker, and in walks a guy carrying a big, long extension ladder. And he goes through the service side of High Point, and I turned to this coworker and I said, "who's that?" I hadn't been here very long. "Who's that?" I don't know. So I went to the front desk gal and I said, "who's the guy with the ladder?" "I don't know. He just walked in with the ladder." We've got a guy with an extension ladder wandering around the service department of High Point, and no one knows what's there. No one questioned him. No one asked him, what are you doing? So social engineering would've been really easy to do at that point in time. I, I went and I simply asked him, hi, can we help you? What are you here for? And he was there to work on something on the roof. So he needed the ladder to get from the floor through the hole in the roof to get up there. He was legit. But that's what that looks like, now. If somebody is in your office building, if feel empowered to go ahead and ask them the question as to why you're here. When I worked in a school district, teachers were not empowered to ask what was going on around them. If they saw another adult in the hallway, they didn't think twice about it, right? You're just another adult. You're probably a parent coming to pick up a child. But those teachers, we needed to empower them to go ahead and ask that question. What are you doing here? Can I help you? That just keeps everyone safe. one example, right? Hopefully we've got everybody now asking questions. Why are you here? Why are you carrying an extension ladder? so does that help answer your question, Brandi?

Brandi: 28:08

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And I, you know, maybe give our listeners, a little bit of insight into what we do for cybersecurity month, because I think that you have actually set a really good example of something that people, I'm all, I'm all about not recreating the wheel, Lynn. Um, and if our listeners can take a little nugget of like, well, what do you actually do? Like, are there different things that you do during that month? is there a theme, uh, you know, how do you do it? I know you've talked about gift cards, you've talked about fun activities. Are you doing that in relation with something? Can you just, and I, it shouldn't take that long, but I, you know, what does that look like? Is there a framework where people can go get resources? You know, how, how is it that, that they might get started?

Lynn: 28:55

Yep. Head to cisa.gov. That is going to get you rolling. They have kits that they put together and they run a theme for each week. Um, for example, one week's theme is often multifactor authentication, so I build messaging around multifactor authentication that week. Why that is good for you, maybe we run a survey then. Are you using multifactor on authentication on everything that you can at home? Yes. No answer. If you respond to the survey, you are in a drawing for a gift card. We already talked about a phishing campaign, maybe around four through the month. If you make it all the way, the way through. You're entered into a drawing for a gift card. another one is passwords, or pass phrases is oftentimes a theme for a week. So if I just find some statistics, maybe that might hit someone's fancy. Um, a little bit of information about pass phrases. Password managers, just a little tidbit of information delivered to everybody along with some fun activity. There's also, if you just look, there's some games out there, so we gotta hit those gamers, right? The little games. Um, I don't. You'll just need to Google for it. Um, but there is one that we oftentimes do where you find all the things wrong in an office, right? They've walked away and left their monitor on, or different things like that. So again, if you complete the game, it entered in, entered into a drawing for a gift card.

Brandi: 30:31

I love it. Okay, Andy, sorry, I'm just pelting her with questions today. Like,

Andy: 30:35

you just go.

Brandi: 30:35

She's so passionate about it and I'm just like, I'm all in in this passion. No lie. Um, okay. Two things. One piece of advice for IT leaders out there. And the second one is one piece of advice that you would, you want our listeners to take away who are not technical, who are sitting behind the chairs every day, coming to work, trying to do the best they can. What would your advice be to those two different audiences? It leaders around this security culture and just in, in just the human beings that are, they're going to work and working hard every single day.

Lynn: 31:09

IT leaders. Remember, it's about the people. You have to bring it to the people level. I know that you have all these tools that you need to control, and that's your day to day, and we appreciate that as people, but you have to talk to the people as people and remember that they might make mistakes occasionally, and we need to have a plan of action if that happens. But remember people and be positive with the people that's going to get you somewhere. Other than that pass phrases, the longer your password is, the less likely it is to be cracked. So start with pass phrases, right String, four words together. Window clock, blue security, easy to type, easy to remember. Get yourself a password manager to keep it in. That's what's going to keep you safe. A different password for every login that you have. Make it that pass phrase, get it to 14 characters at least, and you'll stay safe.

Andy: 32:10

And you just gave away, you just gave away my password, lynn, thank you very much. I'm gonna have to go change my password, my pass phrase now, but that's okay. all right. Thank you for taking time with us today. We really appreciate it. I think this was a great conversation. So if, uh, folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?

Lynn: 32:32

Email of course.

Andy: 32:33

Email of course. All right.

Lynn: 32:35

Of course, lynn.soeth@highpointnetworks.com

Andy: 32:39

lynn.soeth, all right, very good. We appreciate that. Brandi, do you wanna kind of kick us off?

Brandi: 32:44

Beautiful. I love it. I love this conversation. I could talk about this all day long. Lynn, I know you don't have the time, and Andy, you're gonna get sick of me just bombarding her with questions. But you know, if you wanna hear more from, Get to the Point, uh, hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening from. Share it with a friend or a colleague, leave a review. Follow us on social media. We're so glad you were here today.

Andy: 33:04

Join us next time. Um, we're gonna talk about kind of another, another little bit of a human element, um, that surrounds it and the concept of getting too comfortable with our guest. Brandon Conkins on our next episode.

Brandi: 33:22

Take care out there and remember, we're always here to help you get to the point.