UnHacked the podcast with hosts Justin Shelley, Bryan Lachapelle, and Mario Zaki.

Unhacked Episode 85 – Is Someone Living in Your Network Right Now?

What if a hacker has been hiding inside your business systems for months… and you had NO idea?

In this episode of Unhacked, Justin Shelley, Bryan Lachapelle, and Mario Zaki dive into one of the most overlooked — and most critical — layers of cybersecurity: Logging, Monitoring & Detection.

The Creepy Analogy That Says It All

We kick things off with a true story: a stranger secretly living in someone's attic. It's terrifying — and it's exactly what happens during a cyberattack. Hackers rarely break down the front door. They sneak in, set up camp, and stay undetected for weeks, months, or even years.

What We Cover:

  • Why most businesses (even those with an IT provider) have zero proper detection in place
  • How attackers use YOUR systems for crypto mining, DDoS attacks, and worse — without you knowing
  • Real-world breach stories, including a server that had multiple attackers living in it simultaneously
  • Why detection is different from prevention — and why you need both
  • What a SOC (Security Operations Center) actually does and why it can't be done manually
  • The metric that matters most: Mean Time to Detection — minutes vs. months makes all the difference
  • Why moving to the cloud made this problem significantly worse
  • A live example of detection tools catching a Microsoft Quick Assist session in real time

Key Takeaways:

  • Ask your IT provider right now: "What are we doing for monitoring and detection?" If they can't answer — you're in trouble.
  • Once you know you're unprotected, take action. Awareness without action increases your liability.
  • Your business is being attacked right now, 100% of the time. The question is whether you'll know when they get through.
  • Try this: use ChatGPT to generate a cyber insurance questionnaire and have your IT team fill it out — you'll quickly learn what's missing.

This is Episode 11 of our Cybersecurity Basics mini-series — next week we're covering Incident Response.