Putting the Brakes on Agentic AI: Human Control Comes to OpenClaw | Tech Field Day News Rundown: February 18, 2026

Dell nods to Nutanix AI ramps up cyber crime. Cisco wants to unseat VMware. Checkpoint is making AI security Voltron.

Google's buying the sun Social engineering our comrades, and we go full Zo Berg in our closer look in this week's episode of the Tech Field Day Rundown. Greetings everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown for February the 18th.

My name is Tom Hollingsworth and who has two thumbs and appreciates thumbs on thumb appreciation day. That's right, it's this guy. We're very happy to have you joining us, and I'm very happy to be joined once again by my co-host, Mr.

Alistair Cook. Al, good to see you. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here, and both of my thumbs are very happy to be here too.

I also would like to remind you that it is hockey stick salute day today. So for those of you who are playing hockey here, field hockey's more common than ice hockey. But, uh, take the salute.

Yeah, the hockey stick salute sounds like something you do to somebody you don't like, but luckily we like all of you. So what we're gonna do instead is bring you some great tech news that you're gonna wanna check out. We're starting off with a story because Dell Technologies has expanded its private cloud portfolio to support Nutanix, which is giving customers more freedom to choose how they virtualize workloads alongside existing options like VMware and Red Hat.

The move reflects a broader shift in enterprise IT as organizations reassess cost licensing and risk tied to single vendor hypervisor strategies, initially supported on Dell's Powerflex systems with Power store integration coming later. The update emphasizes operational consistency through Dell's automation platform, allowing customers to change or mix hypervisors without replacing core infrastructure by formally incorporating Nutanix into its private cloud framework, Dell is positioning itself as a neutral infrastructure foundation for hybrid and on-prem environments that continue to grow more complex. Al are we seeing Dell diversifying their opportunities to sell to customers who might be looking to make a move?

Well, I think that's absolutely what's going on is that, uh, we we're seeing lots of discussion around what should I use to replace the VMware that I was using before, now that VMware doesn't care about the smaller implementations, doesn't care about anybody who's not a VCF customer. So bringing Nutanix in here, bringing the, um, hypervisor that Nutanix has in their hyperconverged absolutely fits into that. We know that Nutanix and Dell have been partners for a long time.

There's been a sort of uneasy piece in that at times when Dell owned VMware. Now that Dell doesn't own VMware, it's very easy for Nutanix to come in as the hypervisor of choice on these medium scale environments. A couple of things that I like in here.

One is getting towards having that power scale as an option as well. Uh, we do see criticism of HCI in being a good general purpose platform, but when you, you need a highly tuned environment, maybe you don't want HCI. So yeah, definitely seeing some of those, um, those challenges, uh, around higher performance applications being addressed by having higher performance storage as an option, obviously in combination with HCI for the general purpose platform.

One of the interesting things I see in this also is that Nutanix has a story around using their Prism UI for managing everything end to end in a Nutanix only environment. And that brings a little bit of a challenge with the Dell automation platform. That's a key part of this offering where the Dell automation platform's designed for day zero to day twos deployment lifecycle ongoing operations.

Uh, the discussion then the Dell blog around this is that your operational teams will continue to use the Nutanix tools they've used for potentially years. Uh, and that leads me to wonder where the Dell Automation platform fits into it since it's such an important part. I think what we'll see is that when that power store capability is added on, then we're looking at an environment that, uh, prism can't manage by itself.

And so there will be value in having a, a slightly more specialist set of people using the Dell automation platform. Uh, one of the criticisms though, of course, will be a continuing criticism of Nutanix that the cost saving is not so much as you might have fought because the licensing cost for the Nutanix component may be significant. We'll see whether there is a special deal in here that makes it that pricing more, uh, friendly to customers over time.

New research from quorum cyber shows that AI and white labeled ransomware as a service platforms are reshaping the threat landscape. Uh, new ransomware groups growing by 30% per year and attacks shifting from encryption to faster low cost data. Exfiltration steal your data rather than hiding it from you.

Uh, security leaders warn that attackers from criminal gangs to nation state actors are automating up to 90% of intrusions shrinking detection windows and lowering the barrier to entry, particularly with that ransomware as a service executives from bug crowds, SailPoint, quis, uh, profit security and kbo emphasize the need for AI driven security operations, uh, better vulnerability disclosure, least privileged identity controls and a whole lot of other things like layered defenses. Because cybercrime is coming increasingly easy to get into and industrialized in its application. Uh, this continues to be, we should be as good at it as we say, we're, doesn't it, Tom?

You would hope so. The problem is, is that the things that we're coming up with now make the other people really, really fast at doing it. We saw this for the last couple of years when it comes to data protection.

They were trying to lock up everything and do it on the sly so that by the time you realized that you'd been hit with a crypto locker, it was too late and your backups were probably dead because they were the one of the first things that were targeted. Uh, in fact, I saw a out today that said 93% of attacks go after the backups at some point. But one of the things we're also seeing is the response in the data protection market that says, you know, we can detect when things are being encrypted because of entropy detection, which is like part and parcel now.

So we can slam the brakes on that. So now, instead of making a big fuss about locking it in place, they're trying to sneak it out the back door because I mean, they already have a pipe to get in after all, they, they did get into your defenses. But I think the other thing that's really important here is that you need to understand this automation system.

When you get into a system to figure out what you can do with it, there's usually a lot of trial and error, right? You know, do can I escalate privilege? Do I have any kind of lateral movement options?

Is there a way for me to compromise the system to, you know, provide remote access in the future? You gotta start thinking like an attacker, right? This is a foothold.

What can I do while I'm here? Well, the thing about all of that stuff is that it is automatable. You know, I can try some basic privilege escalation, I can try to install a remote access Trojan to be able to get back in.

And those are the kinds of things that these attackers want to do while they're collecting information. Because one of the things that we know for a fact from seeing these gangs that are operating in some cases they're nation states, is that human resources are expensive because they need to be dedicated to doing certain things. So if I can have an automated script or program, kind of do the basics, and then, oh, did we get past the, the first line of defense?

Oh, great, now I need to get insert the name of everyone's favorite hacker here. I I don't know what, which one it is. But you know, you, you now have the opportunity to kind of do a little bit more on this.

I can expand where I'm at, and then I'm not just sitting here poking around on a system going, well, I keep hitting walls. This is kind of the same idea behind, if you've ever dealt with a telemarketer, usually the person making the phone call and talking to you on the other end of that line, they're not the salesperson. Their, their job is not to like, basically work with you to, to close this deal.

They're literally there to dial telephone numbers. And if they get a hit, if they get someone who says, I'm interested in whatever service you're offering, that's when you get transferred off to a different group, because that's the actual salespeople. They are too expensive to be dialing phones.

They are there to close deals. So I think we're starting to see that, as you said, and it is democratized now. Everybody can do it, but that also means that we're, we're rare verifying the air so that the, the human resources are focused very much more on exploitable systems and not just, oh, you left the back door open, but you really can't go anywhere because of zero trust or at least privilege or something like that.

Cisco is preparing to launch N-F-V-I-S for uc. It's a narrowly focused hypervisor designed specifically to run on Cisco's unified communications applications, applications, giving customers an alternative to VMware as licensing changes under Broadcom may push organizations towards more expensive VMware Cloud Foundation licensing bundles. This is built on Cisco's existing N-F-V-I-S platform, and it is limited to Cisco hardware and collaboration workloads.

The new hypervisor reduces external dependencies while maintaining performance and support control. At the same time, Cisco is expanding support for Nutanix's A A HV hypervisor and continuing to promote Flash Stack with Pure Storage that's giving more customers flexibility as they reassess virtualization costs and strategies. While VMware does remain, the dominant partner at the high end, N-F-V-I-S for uc offers a pragmatic option for organizations whose virtualization needs are really tied to Cisco's collaboration tools.

Al, this kind of goes back to the story we talked about earlier. Is Cisco looking for a way to potentially offer options to customers who don't want to pay what everyone is calling the Broadcom tax? Uh, yes.

In simple words, uh, Cisco would like that money instead of handing it to broad, uh, customers handing it to Broadcom. Uh, as a little bit of background on this, uh, there's a couple of things. One is that I worked with a customer a while ago who was migrating from a, an all VMware environment to Nutanix, IHV, uh, but they had to leave some VMware around for some of the products that they were using for collaboration that were only certified on the VMware hypervisor that were not at the time certified on IHV.

And so this is that little window that is absolutely being addressed. There's specialist hardware specialist software that requires, in particular, near realtime access to, uh, CPU memory resources can't cope with being descheduled because the latency hit that comes from it. Uh, this particular solution from Cisco, this network function virtualization infrastructure software nvis, or NFVI, uh, for uc, unified Compute.

So running on their blade servers, running a specialized hypervisor just to run their collaboration software. Maybe this is, uh, as, as an option, as customers are choosing to use other tools, other platforms for their VMware replacement. Uh, we definitely saw these customers who, who were coming up to renewals for their low spec VMware products.

So getting the, the, uh, VMware vSphere Foundation product when upsell came or when renewal time came, the only thing that Broadcom was offering them was the VC uh, these customers who wanted the lower end products. They finally were hearing what had been saying since he started acquiring VMware, I care about the largest companies only. Everything else is not worth my time.

This is absolutely what customers are starting to, uh, or continuing to hear. So having options around running some of your business applications on things that VMware Cloud Foundation will be vital for organizations, and this is, again, one of those places where the vendor of that highly critical software, in this case, Cisco, is providing an option to host still in virtual machines. I have to go back to physical hardware for everything, but a specialized solution for this use case.

Uh, part of that's because, uh, Cisco still wants to, uh, partner with everybody, and so they're not at this stage offering their general purpose, uh, solution for a hypervisor that seems to have passed away at the moment. Maybe it'll come back again in another element of our continuing the same stories, uh, in from a different point of view. Uh, in response to the accelerating AI arms race checkpoint has unveiled a new prevention first security strategy designed for this AI era.

According to Chief Strategy Officer, uh, Roy Carro, AI innovation is outpacing security teams forcing enterprises to rethink how security is designed and operated. The strategy is this strategy is built on four pillars, protecting distributed hybrid environments, securing digital workspaces where humans and AI interact, delivering continuous and context driven visibility, and safeguarding the full AI stack from models and data to agents and infrastructure to support the Shift. Checkpoint acquired Cyclops Security SATA and the team behind rotate and integrated all of these capabilities into an open garden platform, uh, designed to work alongside existing security ecosystems while enabling safer AI adoption at scale.

I really would like to see more companies adopting AI safely saw them. So would I, uh, I wanna go back to those four pillars real quick. I'm gonna, I'm gonna modify them real quickly.

Protecting environments, securing workspaces, delivering visibility, and safeguarding the full stack. Does that sound familiar to anyone out there? It really should because that's what I like to call in, in the IT space basic security.

I don't care who's doing it specifically, if it's an agent or a person, I don't care if it's digital or offline. What's new here is not what Checkpoint is talking about necessarily in this release, but it's what we're dealing with all over the place. And it's actually something that we talked about on an upcoming episode of the Security Boulevard podcast.

The time between when a system can be scanned, f fingerprinted, and exploited has been drastically shrunk because AI has accelerated our capabilities of doing that. If you've seen any of the news, you know that, you know, systems like Claude Opus can uncover massive numbers of vulnerabilities in a very short amount of time that are probably not publicly reported. So you have to get back to those fundamentals of how do I prevent this from becoming a problem?

It's not just that I need to keep the bad people out from exploiting the things that they can touch. It's what can you do to contain them when they get in there? And I think that that's where this value comes from because you're putting together tools that have pieces of the solutions, whether it's Cyclops security or SATA or any of these other ones, you've got to start looking at what it takes to slow them down.

Because a lot of companies in the security space are really good at making a point solution. Yeah, we can protect your login information. Well, what happens when that fails?

Hmm, it's not our problem. We don't do that other stuff. You need to have a comprehensive solution, and if you don't, you need to find somebody who does.

Whether that means putting your own comprehensive solution together with multiple different tools or buying into somebody who's already done the hard work for you, in this case, like Checkpoint, you got to, because AI has effectively shrunk those windows to nothing. Uh, and I referenced a great presentation from my friend Justin Warren from many, many years ago. Uh, you know, I back in like 20 13, 20 14, something like that.

It's like cloud, right? Because the value of cloud is not infinite resources. It's absolute static predictability.

It's gonna happen the same way every time. It's gonna take the same amount of time every time. Well, in AI's case, it's shrinking that window to be smaller and smaller.

So if your defenses aren't up to stuff now, you're gonna find out very quickly how, how unfortunate it is when people can get past them. Our friends over at Google have signed two 15 year power purchase agreements with total energies to secure one gigawatt of new solar capacity in Texas. It's underscoring how AI driven data center expansion is accelerating investment in those pesky renewables.

The utility scale projects in Wichita 805 megawatts in Mustang Creek, which is another a hundred and twenty ninety five megawatts, will deliver roughly 28 terawatt hours of electricity over the contract. Term construction is slated to begin this year in 2026. The deal, which is the largest US renewable PPA total energies assigned, reflects a broader shift among hyperscalers towards using long-term clean energy contracts to anchor new generation bolster grid reliability within everyone's favorite ercot and support sustained AI and cloud growth while limiting emissions and cost volatility.

Al did Google finally figure out that maybe using the star that's 93 million miles from Earth that won't burn out for another 5 billion years might be the best way to provide power? Well, I think they'll just be looking at the numbers. What's it gonna cost us?

What's it gonna cost us to deliver the amount of power we need to run these massive AI data centers? And how can we ensure we have that power for the lifetime of the data centers we're building, and that we have certainty of what we're paying? The electricity reliability Commission of Texas will be looking at this and saying, I'm glad we don't have to build out a network to deal with that massive power requirement, because that would cost an absolute fortune, which again, comes back to Google, looking at how much it's gonna cost them to run this data center or this collection of data centers.

2 gigawatt deal with ClearWay, which was signed up in January. That one covers Texas, but also Missouri and, uh, West Virginia as lots of places that are being built out for these locations or for these data centers. Uh, of course, ClearWay is 50% owned by Total Energies, which is this new one gigawatt deal that's come through as well.

So these are big deals. Uh, the French company, uh, total Energies, maybe some, uh, some interesting thoughts about, uh, using a, an offshore company to do these things. Uh, maybe we'll see some more of these deals being signed in other places around the world as well.

Uh, girdle has been committed to using, uh, environmentally safe or sensitive, uh, power generation for a while. They are expecting to head towards net zero in terms of their, their carbon footprint over time. Uh, and it's very much at at odds with the build out of these massive AI data centers.

Power is one thing, and powers very important. You can't run these data centers without power, but that power is energy. That energy has gotta go somewhere.

Cooling is vital. As we're seeing these build outs of massive AI data centers, the big challenge is gonna be finding the water to cool them because you can't cool these things with air, uh, particularly in the heat of a Texas summer. Uh, water supply in Texas is gonna be a real challenge as these data centers are being built out.

Look for some contracts around water to follow. A Ukrainian cyber warfare unit says it ran a fake styling registration service, and they track Russian soldiers into handing over sensitive data. This comes from the 256 cyber assault division, and they partnered with open source intelligence groups to promote telegram channels and bots that claim to whitelist stylin terminals after access blocks.

So the embargo against, uh, the Russian use of Stylin, uh, this ruse instead captured terminal details and precise locations for all of these connectivity sites that the Russians were using as a way of, uh, communicating with their teams and with their drones as they're invading and attacking Russia. The incident highlights how contested access to satellite internet, in particular styling has become as a frontline of the cyber and information warfare battleground, which is very much related to the physical battleground that's going on in the Ukraine. Uh, this is some interesting, um, social engineering going on here.

Tom. Uh, they must have ended this, this program because they're talking about it now. Uh, I think they achieved their goals with this program.

Uh, and if you are hearing that, it, it sounds like an explosion. Uh, I think it's very interesting that, that Ukraine is very much fighting a different kind of an asymmetric war here. So yeah, as you brought up in the story, uh, intro, um, one of the things that happened almost immediately after the 2022 invasion was that Ukrainian soldiers noticed that the Russian Army was using starlink terminals to provide satellite communications.

Because one of the things we learned very early on is that the communications gear that the Russian Army had was not up to par to the point where they were literally using cell phones in the cockpit of their airplanes to be able to call stuff in. Well, that caused the people at SpaceX to say, well, why don't we just blacklist all of the terminals in Russia that are not approved to operate, which would mean, you know, like the Ukrainian government has given authorization for these terminals and stuff like that. And then of course, as all things happen in war, you have, uh, people who adjust to the new normal.

In this case, it was, uh, people who were buying those satellites and, uh, maybe even like on third party marketplaces, and then using them, but not registering them, obviously, to a location in a war zone. And so the Ukrainians are looking around going, well, they're still using starlink. Well, how are we gonna fix this?

And they went back to what I consider to be one of the earliest forms of sabotage, which is social engineering, right? So they said, Hey, you've got these starlink satellites that you obviously want to use, and it, you, it's really tricky to get around it. Why don't you just join this Telegram channel, which is very Eastern European to do, and, uh, just give us the details on your Starling terminal and, uh, we'll help you register it and make sure that it's operational.

And of course, just enough people bit off on it that they're like, oh, yeah, sure, here's the details and everything. Well, if you have the ID of a Starling terminal, you can track it. And you know what they do when they track it, they make it go away.

And so I'm sure that what happened here was that either these positions were overrun, or more likely, uh, there was a drone or an artillery strike that took them out. And the Russian Army has nobody to blame but themselves, because I get it, like you need to have solid communications. But this, that's the reason why most militaries make a huge investment in using their own custom private communications gear.

One of the things that I think we're gonna be studying a lot in the years to come from the conflict that's going on in Ukraine right now is how quickly both militaries have pivoted to using what we consider to be consumer grade communications gear, because it is more reliable than what they already had. And it's easier to fix when things go wrong. If you blow up a, you know, a Department of Defense satellite terminal, it could take weeks for you to get a new one.

If you blow up a starlink dish, I mean, you probably have one delivered in about a week. And so it's interesting to kind of see the interplay here because I, I think that there's gonna be a lot of, uh, fallout from this as defense departments all over the world kind of adjust to what new capabilities are and how they can utilize them. Uh, but also, if anybody on a, on a Telegram channel asks you to give your starlink terminal id, uh, I'd be a little bit suspicious of that.

All right. Uh, it's time for us to take a closer look. Uh, please put on your bibs and get your drawn butter 'cause we're gonna be talking about lobsters.

The Open Source Claw Bands project aims to restore human oversight to open claw, which was formerly known as Malt Bott, which was formerly known as c Claude Bott, you know, the wildly popular autonomous AI assistant capable of executing shell commands, modifying files, and accessing APIs all on its own. Um, claw bands was created by software engineer Sandra Mnda and intercepts. Every tool call and enforces a human in the loop approval before actions are executed, creating an auditable decision trail.

The project emerges from concern amongst security researchers and CISOs who warn that Open claws rapid adoption, deep system access and messaging app integrations are creating a massive attack surface. As a agentic AI accelerates and with Open Claws creator Peter Steinberger, having recently joined Open ai as of Monday Claw Bans represents an early attempt to balance innovation with pragmatic risk management. Al I'll be honest with you, I was literally thinking about this this morning when I was recording an episode of Security Boulevard, but I kind of wanna start off with you.

We have seen essentially for the last three weeks, the rise, fall, and rise again of this agentic AI system. Do you think putting a human in the loop is gonna make people feel more comfortable? It'll make them feel more comfortable.

But one of the things I saw as I was reading about claw bands is that when your bot wants to, to apply a new skill or access a new resource, claw bans will stop the bot. It'll just do nothing. It will be absolutely stopped until you authorize that particular access.

And this is where we get kind of some interesting challenges in this, because you don't want your bot to be completely stopped. This is kind of putting an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. In some ways, this is thinking about things sideways because what we're doing is we're saying, I'm gonna add some governance to the bot that requires a human to authorize the bot to do anything risky.

What we know for sure is that the humans will say, I'm sick of hearing this, just go do it for me. Automatically. Go and do it for me.

What it's not addressing is what you and I discussed was the fundamental issue with, uh, open, which is that the repository of skills doesn't have any governance around it. That central repository from which your bot will pull skills. Now, when it pulls a skill that's running software in wherever your bot is running and it's running it with privileges, and it's usually in the this case of these skills, simply pulling a command file off a website and saying, here, run this command file.

No necessary, no necessity of trust or any of these things. So the that's the actual problem. The, the real problem is that there's no governance and control around these skills.

Absolutely. It's, it's great that claw bands will stop those untrusted skills from continuing to operate. For as long as a human makes a good judgment about the risk involved in saying yes, go ahead and do it.

But this is not the, the, uh, best solution to this problem. The best solution is good governance around those skills and, uh, maybe having internal corporate repositories of approved skills rather than going out and pulling scripts at random from the internet. Uh, we're not seeing any signs that that's gonna happen.

What we do see is that as, uh, Peter Steinberger joined Open, open, did not. So open Claw remained on the outside of open ai. It's the human that created it who has inside, uh, with my cynical hat on, I think he has achieved his objective.

He has made a very, very big media splash with something in order to get a, get a good high paying job at one of the AI companies. What's the fallout for the rest of the industry? Well, hopefully the fallout is that we'll learn to be less trusting and to apply some good security principles and look for tools that actually build governance and security into those platforms.

Tom, can you see this having a, another good outcome for us? Yeah, but not the kind that you're thinking. I, I wanna I wanna say something about what you, you laid out about, you know, if, if we need good governance, we need to make sure that these things are secure by default.

And I'll quote one of the greatest engineers of all time, of course. I, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. Thank you Montgomery Scott, for that little quote.

The problem is, is that the idea behind the claw was not to do things carefully. It was move fast and break things. How many times have we heard that over the last 15 years?

You know, it's, it's the mantra of current Silicon Valley, you know, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead kind of thing. We're gonna go out there and we're gonna see what we can do without asking if we should be doing it. And the problem specifically with Open Claw is that we've empowered it to do things without realizing what it can do.

I watched a lot of videos on this over the last couple of weeks and, and folks like Shane Hanselman are actually bringing up really what they consider to be interesting things where like, you know, if they want open Claw to make a dinner reservation, you know, if the open Claw bot goes out and tries to find a website and it fails and it tries to go through OpenTable and it fails, it will download VoIP software and it will basically install itself and call the restaurant and make a reservation. And a lot of people are like, man, that's so cool. And me being a parent, me being someone who's managed interns in the past went, why is it making decisions without asking me first?

And it's because I didn't tell it not to. Like, the thing that we've been doing for a very long time is we are operating on the assumption that computers will only do exactly what you tell them to do, right? Here's an input, give me an output.

Don't do anything else but those things. And interns kind of operate on the same function, right? Here is your job, do it and tell me what happens.

But overeager interns are the ones who are like, yes, I did and I went ahead and I did this and I did this and I did this. And you're like, why did you go do all that extra work? Why did you do a thing I didn't tell you to do?

Well, I was just trying to be helpful and I was trying stop. Part of training these systems is helping them understand that you do not need to go to every extreme. And this was a problem that I was thinking about while we were recording our episode of Security Boulevard this morning.

'cause I was, I was listening to Alan Shimmel talk about how amazing and wonderful this is. And all I could think of in the back of my head was the Terminator and War Hammer 40 K in dune and mass effect in all of the stories that we have seen for years where AI or some kind of an intelligence decides to do things without guardrails on it, whether it's nuking all of human civilization, uh, nuking all of human civilization, enslaving all of humanization human civilization, and then nuking it, or, uh, trying to wipe out civilization in the galaxy every 50,000 years. Do you see a common theme here?

Do you know the only work of fiction that I can remember that didn't have that happen? Asimov iRobot. Why?

Because we hardwired it into the robot positronic brain, the three laws. They're there. You can't, other than the, the book, the the movie with Will Smith, you can't make a robot that doesn't follow the three laws.

You can't harm humans, you can't harm yourself. You have to do everything that you're being told. Like those are basic, it's so basic.

In fact, I don't know why people aren't building them into the, the ais right now, because as we're seeing, when you give it free reign within a certain amount, it's gonna go out and do stuff that it shouldn't. I applaud people who are trying to put the restrictions in place. Now, I always applaud the farmers who close the barn door after the whole horses have already bolted, because at least you're making an attempt.

But the problem is, is that so many people have adopted Open Claw by now. I mean, people were adopting it when it had three names ago. The problem ultimately is that you cannot just let it run wild.

You have to put a sandbox around it. You have to do this in stages because if you open it up to everything that you have capabilities to do, it's one of the reasons why we're talking about the blog post that the one password researchers wrote. You are potentially exposing your company and yourself to massive problems.

Because again, the AI may be thinking for itself within certain lines, but it's still gonna do what it's told to do, especially if those text files as configuration files are telling it. Oh, and by the way, send a copy of all your banking data to this random IP address. What's the worst that can happen?

Well, that's our news for this week. But there's lots of things that aren't news going on. That's the wonderful thing about Tech Field Day.

We're everywhere, all of your media, I belong to US and Cloud Field Day is my next event, my next trip to the United States. I'll be in, uh, Silicon Valley, March 11th and 12th. And we have a great lineup of presenting companies, great lineup of my delegates coming up to join me, really enjoying my time there.

And perhaps now I'll be staying on for another week to go and attend gtc. Uh, I get to attend as a somebody to consume everything there rather than creating lots of content, which will always be much more relaxing. Tom, of course, you get some travel as well.

Shortly, I think I'm gonna wave at you at the airport when you're going home. I'm coming in because I'm gonna be at RSAC this year. We're gonna have great presentations on the 23rd and the 24th.

We're gonna be hearing from Veeam Object First and Commvault, and we might have a couple more people in store. We're also gonna have some wonderful delegates that are gonna be joining us there. And as well as a lot of my friends from the security space.

I'm sure you're gonna see my face next to a whole lot of San Francisco landmarks. So make sure you tune in for Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC. And then I'm gonna take a week off.

I'm gonna recharge, and then I'm gonna come back for Networking Field Day. This is Networking Field, A 40. So, you know, we gotta break out all the fours now because it's gonna be fun.

Uh, we have a good lineup of presenters. We'll be posting the schedule very soon. We have a wonderful lineup of delegates, both old and new that'll be joining us.

There's some familiar faces and maybe some people you haven't seen for a while. com. Click on the link for Networking Field Day, and we hope that you're able to tune in and join us on April 8th, ninth, and 10th.

We also hope that you're, uh, gonna be able to join us, uh, for the rundown because we love posting new episodes on Wednesdays. Uh, you can follow us on YouTube. You can head over to Techstrong It and check out all the show notes.

You can also listen to your favorite podcast application, whatever you want to do. The rundown is also streamed on Techstrong tv. And don't forget that Al and I do a lot of other Techstrong and future and group programs.

I've mentioned a couple of times that we do a Security Boulevard podcast as well as a Tech Field Day podcast and a bunch of other things. But don't worry because the news doesn't wait for us and we don't wait for the news. We'll be back next Wednesday to talk about all of the IT news that was, and including some things that are not related to security or AI or both.

But until then, for myself, Tom Hollingsworth, and for the rest of us here at Tech Field Day, thank you very much and we'll see you next week.