Transcript
A (0:01)
They called me a few days after I met with them and they said, yeah, we need to, we need to step on the gas pedal here. And I'm like, what happened? And they said, one of our biggest customers has been hit and they're completely locked. And they've notified us to say, we're not sure we're going to be able to pay you. And that's when they started thinking, oh, the Stivers stuff is real. When our clients are saying they can't pay us. So that's when it really starts.
B (0:33)
Welcome to Cybersecurity Today. I'm your host, Jim Love. One of the cool things about my job as a podcast host is that I get to meet a lot of people who are doing some interesting things and I'm fascinated by what they're doing and what issues come up. And one of those issues for me is how do we advance cybersecurity with small and even medium sized businesses? Not in theory, but what do you really do? And that's what I was interested in talking about when I set up this meeting with Graham Berry, a white hat hacker, a CISO with a lot of years of experience, and somebody who works with companies that have anywhere from a couple of people to hundreds and more. This is the conversation we had. I recorded it with permission, of course. And when these conversations are interesting, I share them with you and I think you'll find some interesting stuff in this conversation. Welcome, Graham.
A (1:28)
Thank you very much, Joe. Glad to be here.
B (1:31)
Your bio says you fell in love with computers when you discovered a Tandy TRS 80 at the public library in rural Ontario. So I have two questions. One is, what's the town? And how old were you?
A (1:46)
It was Hanover, just south of Woolen Sound. And I was probably eight or nine maybe. That was my first exposure to computers.
B (1:59)
Yeah, I, yeah, and the magic of it, I, I first saw those things, I think I was in my 20s when I first saw one in northern Saskatchewan. And I think La Ronge and this, this guy was already running his business on this TRS 80 and I would, I was, it was magic. Yeah, you obviously stayed interested in all this. Tell me a little bit more about how you got from there to here.
A (2:24)
Yeah, it's. I, you know, I, I progressed through the Commodore series, like the Vic 20, the 64 and all that. And then I went to school for computer technology and was in Waterloo and, you know, that was the hotbed of technology then. And I started with a retailer at the time and ultimately they went out of business and then Jumped into some other retailers in the, you know, in the early 90s, laptops were, you know, they were, they were getting more prolific in businesses, but they were still expensive. I remember like the Toshiba tech routes were like thousand dollars. Exactly. And we started getting clients around the Waterloo area like HP and a lot of the technology companies. So that just kind of spun out from there then into government. Really worked my way from tech support up to director level. Really got to understand the business side of technology and that's where it's really took from there. I started my own business about seven years ago, moved over this way to Lindsay, and I'm a close jaunt to the gta, so it works out well.
