554 NetAlly CyberScope: First Look!

Hello friends, Uncle Mark here with yet another episode of the IT Business podcast. This is the Wednesday live show, where we still try to do what we always try to do, and that is help other IT business owners. Whether you are a managed service provider, solopreneur, computer repair shop or even just a system administrator, we're all trying to help you do things better, smarter and faster. And tonight I know that some of you are tuning in because of this thing here. This is the Net Ally Cyber Scope. I got it yesterday, I played with it a little bit last night, played with it today and I've got some thoughts and we'll go through all that I know about. And just a little bit Hello to everyone in the chat. Our usual suspects are there, hello, hello. We are streaming almost each and every Wednesday night, 8pm Eastern, on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and then this will be released as an audio podcast later this evening or tomorrow morning. Tonight, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about the Cyber Scope. I've got news on some vendors I also want to talk about, oh, starting something new for the podcast that I hope will continue a little thing we're going to do monthly that will allow for you, as a listener, to participate and possibly win a prize at the end of the year at the holiday party that I do every year. Don't know when it's going to be yet and I don't know exactly all the details, but we'll get to that in just a little bit, let's see. Let's start off with the first thing I want to do before I forget, because it is getting close.

TechCon Unplugged is the conference that Paco and Rick over at MSP Unplugged are doing, and I should be telling you more about it because I am the MC this year, and that is coming up September 7th through the 10th in New Jersey, and I think there are still some tickets and I know that if you are close to where they are, you can still get them and come hang out, and this is one of those intimate type of conferences where you know you're not going to be lost in the shuffle. Yes, there will be vendors there. I just pulled up the website. We are 21 days and four hours away, so tickets are still available. This is a conference bringing the IT community together. The speakers, it looks like, are all set and ready to go, sponsors are in place, a couple of social events that are happening and the location, just to let everybody know, it is the Delta Hotels, Woodbridge, new Jersey. Don't know anything about it except what's on the website but got a good room. So that is September 7th through the 10th. Tickets still available.

TechCon Unplugged. Want to make sure I shout those fellas out before we get started. Let's do a little bit of news, all right, so one of our patrons is actually Synchro and they have added me to their press release list, and this is something that actually got announced last week, but we got so occupied with the show that we didn't go into it. But they have introduced a new team plan that is designed for MSPs with multiple technicians and empowers them to organize and automate their workflows how they choose. The addition of the team plan allows MSPs to take advantage of features that will help them solve the challenges that come with managing a growing business efficiently with many technicians and even more clients, and here are some of the benefits and features. They have an enhanced splash top, which includes multi monitor support and multiple texts per session. That sounds like something that is pretty good. They now have Azure AD Sync, which is a seamless integration to enable contact syncing and Microsoft 365 billing automation. They have real time ticket automations and assignments, power BI integration, scheduled database exports and more personalized support and onboarding experience. So this is something that they think is going to be great for MSPs. The team plan they've publicly announced the price. It is available for $189 per user per month and the current base plan, which is named Core that is now the new name. It is still the $139 per user per month with all the existing features. And both of these are available with a no contract monthly per user price with unlimited endpoints and access to the entire Syncro platform, which includes PSA, RMM and remote access functionality. So that is news coming from Syncro.

I want to make sure everybody heard that that again was announced last week. Let's see Anybody going to DattoCon Now. That is coming up October 2nd through the 4th and it is down here in Florida, not far from where I am. I think it's about 40 minutes with good traffic down at the Intercontinental in Miami, Florida. I'm on the fence. I'll be honest with you. I've not actually yet been to a DattoCon. This I thought was going to be a surefire dunk for me to go, even if I did not spend the evening. But I'm on the fence. I am still a Datto user. I still have Datto backup appliances out there, even though I know I've told you I've off boarded some. I still have IT glue and I still have the Datto networking with all of the wireless access points out there.

I know that there has been a ton of grumbling in the community about Kaseya and some of the problems that people have had. I myself, to be honest, didn't think I had any. Although I did, I had some of the same billing issues that others have had. Mine are actually not that bad, because what happened was apparently they didn't bill me for IT glue for three months, not a big deal. They did catch up and I did not know that. Kim told me about that because I was talking with somebody else about it and said oh, we don't have any issues, yeah, we did. And then this past week I actually so I think I got the consolidated invoice on Friday or maybe it was before that, which is on auto pay, and then yesterday I get an email asking for payment and I'm like my stuff's already paid and go to find out, looking in part of the invoice was paid automatically, parts of it or not, like the IT glue again. So again, for me not huge, but I also don't have, you know, a big bill where it's thousands of dollars of mistake each month.

I know that. You know people have talked in the forums, in the groups I'm not going to call any of them out and I know there is backlash. I know that people have come to their defense and said no issues. That's where I'm at and I'm considering DattoCon. I don't even know how much it is. I know it's a lot and I'm not getting a free ticket, so I think that may be part of why I can't make a decision yet. Let me go to the site while we're here on the air, DattoCon, and it says sold out. So no, I don't even know what the price is, but I got a call from my rep who said that because I'm a legacy Datal user, they could still get me in. So I'll have to follow up with that tomorrow. I was supposed to follow up today but I got busy with the client and that's where we are.

One good thing about freedom voice phones now I know that whatever it was, three years ago we were big on freedom voice here and when GoDaddy purchased them we thought there might be an issue. And turns out there was. GoDaddy bought them and basically did nothing until they decided we're not going to do anything, including allow you to onboard new clients. So we are down to two clients with a total of, I think, 15 phones still with freedom voice. Everyone else we are migrating.

And for those of you asking, Marv, what are you using? Well, we are on intermediate. Still, I know that there are other great VoIP vendors in the channel I've talked to Connect Me, voice, be VoIP. There are others. Intermedia, when I made the switch, has been good and one of the things that I've done is all of the clients that we off-boarded from freedom voice. They didn't ask for the phones back. So I've got I don't know 60 phones here that anytime we need to get a new phone for an intermediate client, we just take one of those phones, take the best looking ones, and Intermedia is a BYOP. Bring your own phone and we just configure it. We reset it to the default and Intermedia has got a nice little set of instructions. It literally is basically three things to do change the password, change the provisioning server, change another setting, phone automatically reboots, connects to Intermedia and you're golden. So did that again today. So all of these phones we are reselling as clients make the choice. I've got a client that we might be able to take away from the Comcastic company down here. I think they've got about 38 phones, so I'm going to try to sell 38 of these freedom voice phones and reprovision them as Intermedia. So that's where we are there.

All right, I think that is all the news and that is all that most of you care about as I take a sip, and let's get to the main event that I know many of you are here for, and that is the Net Ally CyberScope. All right, so the first thing I need to tell you is that I didn't have a chance. I was going to make a video and show you the unboxing and it came in a big old box, and the first thing I need to tell you is that it came in this like bomb secret briefcase type thing. That is a hard shell, and I mean it with all the cushioning and all the stuff in there. I've taken everything out. It's empty, but that is what it came in, so it was very well protected. So that's the first thing, and I have to at least let everybody know.

This is not one that I purchased. Net Ally kindly sent this to me. I'll be honest, I don't even know if I get to keep it, but if I do, thank you very much. So let me first give you my first impressions. First of all, it's black. I don't know what that means. I don't know if that's just to signify that this is like the hackers version of the ether scope, which is green. And I'm going to do a full part, I'm going to go off screen for a second and show you side by side. They are literally the same size, the same format. So there's really, in terms of what you're getting, in terms of the device, literally everything's the same, except for the software inside.

So, upon first impression, let me say that this, to me, is really just a souped up ether scope. And for those that don't know what the ether scope is, it is literally the networking assessment tool that allows you to do network discovery. It allows you to do some testing, both copper and fiber and Wi Fi and a whole bunch of other stuff when you add on the apps. So first impression is that when I turned it on, it literally comes up looking exactly like the ether scope screen. So if you are familiar with the link runner and the ether scope, you'll notice that it's pretty much the same. So I've got it booting up here. I'll let you see it on the screen here as it starts up, has the nice little net ally logo.

Then it's got the moving detector and I know you’re; this is horrible. I don't have a production studio, but there we go. So it came up here. That was what not even 15 seconds. Everything's on the screen and what I'm going to do now is go ahead and connect this to the network and I'm going to do just a quick little demo of what I found here. So I need to connect to my link live account, and that is one of the things that is really good about this. So let me go ahead and share the screen and if you have questions, go ahead and throw them in the chat. I don't know if I'll have the answer but go ahead and do that and if there's enough interest, we'll do something after the show.

But here's where we are. So let me present this screen here. We're going to share, share and share. Sorry if you are listening by audio, but this is where we're at All right. So here is my link live portal, and this is free with Net Ally. So if you get any of the Net Ally tools, even something like the link sprinter, which is their low end tool, you will be able to get access to that. It is free. It saves all of your tests, all of your analysis, your Wi-Fi audits and maps.

But we are going to focus on the cyber scope tonight. So there is coming up right now establishing a secure connection. Now you can remote to this, either by going to the link live portal or by doing a simple VNC connection using the free VNC software, so something that you can do. If you want to send this to a site, I, first of all, I'm not ever going to recommend that. This thing is pretty expensive to let out on my site. So unless I got an American Express black card as collateral, I don't know that I would. But you can.

So, again, let me go back to the screen here and I know this may not show everything in a size that you can see, but it comes with all the normal stuff that the EtherScope comes with. It comes with your auto test, your discovery, your Wi-Fi air mapper, path analysis, blah, blah, blah. And the only real difference is there's a different color greens. It's like a teal in map icon. But as you go in and you'll see all of the same auto test features there. These are one of the things that I love is that it automatically will go and test your wired connection If it's connected to a cable as you can see, I've got a good network right now, so that is good identifies the switch, the port.

It goes out and grabs an IP address, tells me where it's getting DNS from and does a ping out to Google or any other place that you want it to test to as well. You can deep dive into the switch and do pings. You can do all sorts of stuff with that. So that's just the basic. You can also connect with Wi-Fi. I've got it set up to my guest network right now. So, as you can see, it is quickly scanning for and testing the access point. It will connect, hopefully, get an IP address and give me information there. It tells me that it is connected to channel 44. It gives me the utilization, there's the IP address, the access point that it connected to, gives me a DNS test and so forth there. So, even if you deep dive into the channel, you can see it will give you your channel information. You can go into channel details and get your SSIDs on there, your access points, your clients, our traffic, blah, blah, blah.

So from the very start it looks just like an EtherScope, works just like an EtherScope. If I go into discovery and I can go in and see the network, it is already out scanning. There's my BCDR brother printer. There's my data eight port switch. There's an ingenious switch that I just hooked up. This is a 10G switch, and I did this because this is a 10G tester, so it will give me the speeds, interfaces up, down, blah, blah, blah. So all your basic tests. Now I can go through the rest of the stuff here. But I'm telling you, folks, if you've seen anything that we've done on the EtherScope, it literally has every EtherScope feature here.

But what is new, as far as I can tell, is the little in map, and that is where you have your testing and what? What Net Ally is saying is that this is a comprehensive cybersecurity tool and it will do a security assessment, network vulnerability scanning, yada, yada, yada. Now I'll be honest, I'm not an in map person, so out of the box, I really don't know what that means. The top four are in map settings. That actually came with the system. So top 100 ports HTTP, http, password auditing, graded ports. And then I added these two that I, when I have worked with in map, something to broadcast DHCP, discover and shares. That's what I've added.

But if we were to go and add our own thing, this is the way you would add an in map Peps, you would basically name it. You have options that you can do and these would be you know, if you wanted to specify ports, that you're looking for something like RDP, if you want to see what open RDP ports are showing on the network across all the devices, you can do that in there. The script. By default it comes in disabled. I turn it on, I name it and then the arguments and because I'm not an in that person, I really don't know what I'm doing.

But here, if I go to name and again, this is probably going to be hard to read and I'm sorry for the audio listeners here, but what this is showing is all of the in map commands that you can add, such as the AJP authorization brute Again, I'm not an in that person, but I know some of these are going to be you can do brute testing of passwords. You can get information queries, spoofing back, orifice info, bitcoin stuff. So it all looks like this is the type of stuff that if you wanted to check your network for these vulnerabilities, it would do that. There is the broadcast DHCP discoverer that I put on there. DHCP6 is there DNS service discovery, drop box listener, jenkins discoverer, MS SQL discoverer, NetBIOS. So there's a lot of stuff in here and again.

To be honest, I've been scrolling here for what? About a minute and I'm only to the Cs out of this. So I'm going to do a quick, fast scroll and you can see that there is a lot of these in-map commands in there. So this looks like if you know what you're doing, this will be a good tool. Now, most of you are going to be like well, Marv, I can do in-map for anywhere, yep, that's true, but having all of the features in here, for instance, if I wanted to, let's say, go to my data device here and it gives me all the information of interfaces and stuff say, I wanted to do the in-map test of graded ports, well, that's probably not the best one to do, but I just add it there and it adds graded ports into the discovery test and this one's probably not the right one to do it to. I probably should have done it to well, there we go, it does.

So what happens is when you go back to the data port, you see where the color changed on graded ports, which says that it has finished its scan. The scan took 11.86 seconds and it gives the report for the device with the IP address of all 1000 ports scanned and it says that all 1000 ports are closed. So that is good. It is showing an Open Mesh MAC address and I don't know what that means. Again, this is something where I think that once I familiarize myself with in-map, I would better be able to know what this means.

But if we were to go to where did I go to? Oh, GSR-Tampa1. That is a remote server that I'm setting up for a client. So let me go to another in-map. I don't. Oh, let me see if that RDP no, I don't have it in there. But let me see if I go to top 100 ports. Do that and again, it shows up in the discovery test. It actually shows me green where it has scanned the top 100 ports against that device, starting in-map, and it has the scan 0.0012S latency, 99 filtered ports. It is showing an Open Port 5357, tcp, wsdapi service. So, yeah, so it showed me there and it gives me a result codes of success. So again, I'll be honest, I've only had this for a day. I've only really used this on my network and one client network this morning. That was really small and if I were to give you an honest assessment after my first day not yet impressed, only because I know that I don't know in-map and it looks like in-map is the only additional thing other than the EtherScope that's on here.

Now I have not gone through all the apps to see if there are any cybersecurity apps in here that might come useful. And I purposely let me go back and say this I purposely did not go out and look for CyberScope information to figure out how to use this. Even in anticipation of getting this device, I wanted to get it open it up out of the box and see how much I could figure out on my own. And, like I said, I mean I've played around with in-nap so I was able to at least find the commands, put those in there, but I haven't gone through, like I said, all the apps in here. So it looks like it's got all the regular apps, got an email tester in here. So these are all things that as I go through, and maybe there are some apps in here. It's got the IP tools, security IP tools, wi-fi analyzer, keeper, keeper, password manager.

There probably are some additional things in here, but I wanted to give you just pretty much my first look at the device and tell you what I thought. For those of you that are watching on video, this little antenna I have up here I just added to do some stuff In terms of what comes in the box and let me stop sharing the screen because nothing else to see there and close that and so out of the box, obviously I got the tester. I got one wire mapper, so if I wanted to test a wall jack, I've got a fiber SFP module. That came with it as well, an RJ45 coupler, and then I also got an omnidirectional antenna. This can be add-on. So this will check omnidirectional Wi-Fi.

And what I think a lot of us really would like is an analyzer A I don't know why the name just escaped me and obviously I was not a spectrum analyzer. That's what that is. So if you wanted to do some Wi-Fi testing and see really truly what overlap and interference and how the spectrums are, that is included as well. So, again, if you're just doing basic network support, I mean this might not be for you, but if you are trying to troubleshoot networking stuff and need to do it fast, if you need some Wi-Fi testing and need it fast, this would be a good tool. And I'll be honest with you, it's not cheap. I think it's averaging 13 to 14 grand. But I think there's some of us out there that would love this tool.

And the question that I always get is Marv, if you were buying this yourself, would you buy it? The short answer is yes, and that is probably because I started off buying these tools. I think I bought my first one. I think it was 99 or 2000. And I spent 1,100 bucks on it Back then. That was a heck of a lot of money, but I needed something that I could refute, and this was just a cable tester. Back then I was having issues with cable installations and I wanted to make sure that I could refute when I knew that there were cable issues, and I didn't want to rely on the cable guy or cable gal to tell me yes or no. I like to be able to go in after an installation and test them myself. So that's where I started back those many years ago. Would I be willing to spend this money now? Yes, only because I have progressed and I have spent a couple of thousand, five thousand, I mean I would. Now I probably would try to do the upgrade programs and not spend the whole money, but I would do it.

I have found that this has been a great tool when I've got clients that you know, even if you're doing I mean, listen, even a client with 20, 30 people and then you add, you know computers, you add Wi-Fi, so phones, tablets, you know a 20 person office can get close to 100 devices on the network. But if you need to check stuff, you need something that can do that. So I've. I use this in just about every environment I go to. But of course, the big advantage is when you're walking into the big clients or you've got a hundred. You know users and stuff, and I've had people that have called me to literally just do a network analysis for them and it's a tool that I listen to, yes, you can do it cheaper if you want to. You know, put together your own personal networking kit, but I like having everything in the palm of my hand that I can do cable fiber Wi-Fi.

Like I said, it's got an air mapper on there so I can do floor plans. It's got a path analysis, spectrum analysis. It would do capture. There's so many other things that can do Take pictures of your IT closet. If you're stuck in there, if you need a flashlight to see, it's got the flashlight built in there. There's a ton of stuff that this can do and you can set profiles for each client so that all you do is switch the profile and you will have all of the settings, all of the network settings. If they've got the land, this was all in there. So that's my first look. I'm going to reach out to the Net Ally people and probably our good friend Mike Pennacchi and do deep dives with them to really see what makes this the cybersecurity assessment tool that they are claiming it probably is. But because I don't know in-map and I don't know all the other apps in there, I can't say it just yet, but I have to believe that that's what they're saying. So that's where we are. If you have questions that you want to ask or if you have stuff that you've already seen the CyberScope in action, send me an email and let me know and be glad to talk about it. All right, I take all my CyberScope notes, put them over here and take another sip.

One thing that I wanted to introduce is after last week's discussion and for those of you that are either listening out of order or missed an episode or skipped it Last week I had Lori Sites on, who is a stress eradication expert. She does a lot of other stuff as well, and we talked about how to say thanks to clients, and one of the things that came up is that she literally said that promotional gifts or promotional items are not gifts, and we got to talking about, well, what types of things are good gifts that you should give your clients, and we had a couple of suggestions that came in the chat while we were on the air, but I thought why don't we allow people to participate? And this is where the audience participation comes in. I am putting a link in the chat. It will be in the show notes and I will actually bring it up here and share the screen as well.

I'm going to start doing what I call the monthly queue, and nothing super special, but it's going to basically be a monthly question in the month and it's going to help me get a little bit more interaction. Now, this is something that's not. It's not super scientific, it's not super hard, and it's only one question. And this month's question is going to be what is your most unique or memorable gift that you've given a client to say thank you? And I just want to get some ideas of what people have done, share them with the rest of the community. I think that that's pretty cool that we can share. Hey, what things have you done to say thank you for a client that maybe I can use? So we're going to do that. I will share all of them. But, more importantly, I think what I'm going to do well, I am going to do it, I just don't know how is I'm going to? Yes, I'm collecting your name and email because we are going to collect everybody's stuff and keep it for a drawing. I don't obviously think I can get enough sponsorships or put enough money out of my pocket to give away something every month, but everybody that answers these questions, whatever they may be, will get a spot for a raffle or some sort of giveaway that we do, and I know that I like to do one at the holiday party. So hopefully we can have you know three, four, five things that we give away. So if you answer these monthly queues, that will give you a spot into that giveaway. If we do special ones, then those will be one offs. But we'll let you know at the time.

I just whipped this up together last night, so that's why I don't really have much on it. It's just Uncle Marv's question of the month and your name, email and just a quick answer what is the most unique or memorable gift that you've given to a client? To say thank you. And this is something that we thought about doing before with you know, hey, what's the number one tool out of your tool bag? You know things of that nature. So we're going to start doing that. I know it's the middle of the month, so I don't know if this will get a full month or if we'll keep it going for a month and a half. I don't know. We'll see how it goes, but just take your time. Again, I'm going to have the link here in the chat, I'm going to have the link in the show notes and then, of course, if you just want to go to it business, podcast up in the tab, it will say monthly Q and you just simply click on that and that will take you to whatever question we have going. So that's it. I hope that you feel that out and participate and again we'll share all of the answers and hopefully get some great ideas with share with each other.

And that's it for my show. I think I've hit everything that I wanted to get to. Of course, I do want to say thank you for the sponsors that we have for the show obviously presented by Net Ally. I want to say thank you to them for all that they do. The live stream presented by computers done right. Mr. John Reed, who's with us just about every week, a great community member here at MSP, unplugged and has been great for the community for a while. Thank you, john. And of course, instant house call of Corey Fruitman has always been a champion for us.

And if you need a remote support tool that is not like the big boys but has all the big boys stuff, so quick, little, small price for remote support and you can get all the same features unattended access, white labeling, all that stuff Instant house call dot com and you can sign up without even giving your credit card. So great thing there. All right, Let me get my screen all set up here. That's going to do it. A quick show, like I said, I wanted to give my quick opinion of the EtherScope. I will use it now for probably two to three weeks.

I will reach out to my friends and see if we can do a deep dive, maybe a special show, and I'm going to skip Florida man tonight only because there have been some absolutely crazy stories, a lot of crime, a lot of murder in the last week. So outside of one almost naked dude throwing rocks inside of McDonald's Nothing really fancy. You can do your own search for Florida man and I know that some of you always try to send me a story to see if I saw it. Yeah, I did see the man throwing rocks inside of McDonald's because he was unhappy with his food. They would not give him a refund or his or new food and he went crazy, got arrested. What else is new? All right, folks, that's going to do it. We will be back next week.

I do have a guest; I just don't have the name in front of me. So we'll be. Actually, you know what? I'm going to quickly run over to my calendar and see who we have so I can tell you and you think that it is a good guest. So, as I break the Cardinal Rule of video and move my screen around, play on my phone and schedule events, let's see… Ah, next week IT business podcast live with Fernando Leon from MSP corner. So that is next week show 8pm Eastern, same time, same channel. That's it for now. Thank you all for watching. Fill out your monthly Q question and see you next week, and until then, Holla!