We start by roasting ourselves with a look back at the best (and worst) podcast moments of the year, from the "Wayne's East Texas Hog Farming" bit to the time Richard almost died drinking Jalapeno Mead on air. We also share the behind-the-scenes chaos of our travel vlog to Illinois and the team's unfortunate luck with deer collisions in Waco.

Then, we get down to business. The team discusses the evolution of Scinary's tech stack this year, specifically the launch of Scinary Connect (XDR) and why the rollout was a "beta within a beta." Pierre breaks down the switch to "Firewall Health Checks" and the common misconfigurations he's finding in Fortigate setups across the state.

Finally, we look ahead to 2026: New integrations with SonicWall and Palo Alto, the Central Texas Cyber Hub initiative for K-12 students, and Richard’s crusade to build the perfect Backup & Recovery solution.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The "Jalapeno Mead" Incident: Reliving our favorite podcast clips.
• Travel Nightmares: The Illinois Vlog and hitting deer in Texas.
• The evolution of Scinary Connect: Bringing XDR and FortiGate logs together.
• Why we launched "Block-as-a-Service" for firewalls.
• Firewall Health Checks: Why "Default Accept" rules are still haunting us.
• The Central Texas Cyber Hub: Giving rural K-12 students a shot at a cyber career.
• 2026 Roadmap: Why Backup & Recovery is our next big target.
• A final security tip: If you don't need the network this holiday, UNPLUG IT.

Check out our upcoming webinar "Default to Hacked" on Dec 17th!
https://webinar.zoho.com/meeting/register?sessionId=1034168403

Connect with Scinary Cybersecurity:
https://www.scinary.com
https://x.com/scinarycyber

https://www.linkedin.com/company/scinarycyber/

Cybersecurity #YearInReview