Sysadmin
Your Firewall's Management Console Belongs Off the Public Internet: Lessons from the September KEV Surge
Between 21 and 25 September 2026, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) expanded its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue with a barrage of high-severity flaws across critical edge and enterprise infrastructure. The list reads like a core inventory of enterprise IT deployments: Check Point Management Server and Security Gateways, Microsoft on-premises SharePoint, F5 BIG-IP, Citrix NetScaler, and MikroTik RouterOS. In multiple instances, weaponized exploitation preceded vendor patches, leaving internet-exposed administrative interfaces vulnerable to unauthenticated remote execution.
Stop Clicking Through Fourteen Menus: Why PowerShell Is the Turning Point for IT Support
At 8:15 AM on a Monday, a helpdesk technician faces a wall of fourteen fresh tickets. The accounting department print spooler has stopped responding. Four remote laptops crawl at a snail’s pace after weekend cumulative updates. An executive account is locked out, and human resources submitted a spreadsheet containing five new hires who need user accounts, cloud security groups, and mailbox access before their 9:00 AM orientation. Resolving that queue through graphical interfaces requires opening remote desktop sessions across slow network tunnels. It demands clicking through services.msc, navigating Task Manager menus, manually verifying event viewer logs, and copy-pasting employee names across administrative browser portals. Each ticket consumes eight to ten minutes of repetitive pointer motion. By the time the morning queue clears, half the workday has disappeared into routine mechanical clicking.