Russell Smith

This article compares Cayosoft Guardian Protector, Semperis Purple Knight and PingCastle, 3 popular free tools that help you reduce risk in Active Directory (AD) and Microsoft Entra ID. While Purple Knight and PingCastle focus on point-in-time assessments, Guardian Protector adds continuous change monitoring and real-time alerting, which changes how you operationalize identity security day to…

This Week in IT, Microsoft launched an AI assistant that lives inside SharePoint that automatically organizes your content. Redmond rolled out agents in preview that write Word reports and analyze spreadsheets. Plus, there’s a new unified Marketplace for AI tools and Windows 11 24H2 is getting enterprise‑grade Wi‑Fi 7. Links and resources Episode overview

Organizations often use Microsoft Power Automate to cut down on repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and save time for more important work. But now, Copilot agents are stepping in with their own way of handling automation. Both are useful, but they work best in different areas. Copilot agents vs Power Automate Power Automate: The reliable, behind-the-scenes…

Qualcomm unveiled laptop chips with 18 cores and an 80‑TOPS AI engine, promising multi‑day battery life and remote device control. Meanwhile, Microsoft is quietly giving away AI chat in Office, and opening its Copilot platform to Anthropic’s Claude models. Thanks to Cayosoft for sponsoring this episode of This Week in IT. Links and resources Episode…

When Drift, acquired by Salesloft last year, suffered a breach in August 2025, the incident underscored a problem security teams have long underestimated: OAuth integrations. Attackers leveraged stolen tokens to move laterally, gaining access to Salesforce and Google Workspace environments across hundreds of organizations. The breach highlights how OAuth—a technology meant to simplify identity and…

In this episode of Petri Dish, CTO and Co-Founder of Nudge Security Jaime Blasco, provides an in-depth analysis of the recent Salesloft Drift breach, highlighting vulnerabilities in SaaS OAuth integrations and the sophisticated tactics used by threat actors. This discussion is a must-watch for IT professionals looking to understand the evolving landscape of cyberthreats and…

This Week in IT, a global phishing‑as‑a‑service empire goes down, the EU forces Microsoft to unbundle Teams, and even Microsoft admits Copilot might not pay for itself. Thanks to Cayosoft for sponsoring this episode of This Week in IT. Links and resources Episode overview This Week in IT, Russell covers recent developments in IT security,…

Active Directory (AD) has been around a long time, but it remains the primary target for attackers. Research shows that nine out of ten breaches involve AD or Entra ID. Many environments today are hybrid, which further complicates keeping organizations secure. While free tools give you a quick snapshot of risk, enterprise grade security requires deeper…

This week in IT, Microsoft fixes more than 80 bugs—eight critical and two zero‑days—while simultaneously rolling out a swath of new AI‑powered features. At the same time, IT admins will be able to block Office apps from saving files locally. And VBScript is headed for the dumpster truck. Links and resources Episode overview This Week…

Gartner says AI PCs are about to go from niche to standard—31 % of all PCs this year and virtually everything by 2029. At the same time, Microsoft and Cloudflare are quietly building a new web where pages answer your questions directly, potentially leaving Google’s search model in the dust. And just when Copilot promises…

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, has been outspoken about the way artificial intelligence (AI) companies are harvesting content. His argument is simple but important: AI vendors are scraping websites, including those of small publishers like Petri, and using the content to train their models. That same content is then re-served to users in the form of…

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) sits at the heart of most enterprise IT environments. When it goes down, employees can’t log in, applications stop working, and business grinds to a halt. Built‑in tools, like Windows Server Backup, offer only basic system‑state backups. And the AD Recycle Bin can recover deleted objects for a limited time but…