Bill Bernard, VP, Security & Content Strategy 
Bill Bernard here, hoping to introduce you to one of our newest and most valued members of the Deepwatch Security Experts team, Stanley “Tha-Bot” Tabot! Stanley is a recent addition here at Deepwatch, a SOC Analyst in fact. Stanley appears to be at the beginning of his career, having joined LinkedIn just last month, and this seems to be his first ever job, with no start date listed.
Stanley, would you please introduce yourself to everyone?
Stanley?
You there Stanley?
Well, there must be something wrong with his keyboard.
Stanley is being too modest. Seems he’s got a PhD from Frell U1, having done his undergraduate work at Wossamotta U2. His doctoral thesis was on using web bots to drive cybersecurity awareness through social media tools. We’re expecting him to rapidly make his way up to the C-suite in the next 6 months or so, and you’d do well to connect with him3.
By now you’ve probably realized that I’m laying it on a bit thick here. “Tha Bot” is only real in that someone created him as a phishing LinkedIn account – the screenshots you see above are legit – only the names and avatars of the innocent have been modified. He has no prior experience, with one repost as his “activity,” but as of this writing Stanley has 57 followers, and LinkedIn has yet to catch up with our reports to take him down.
Identifying Stanley as a fraud is an important cyber resilience step – arguably one of the most important because it means you’ve recognized the problem before Stanley has done anything damaging. It takes some skepticism, or perhaps cynicism, to not take him at face value but investigate before being sucked in.
And isn’t that what April Fools’ Day is all about? Being on guard against pranks, tall tales, and jokes trying to get you to fall for something not true? It just seems today is made to be a Cyber Resilience Holiday. After all, aren’t these the same circumstances we face every day with emails, texts, and other forms of phishing and social engineering? And given that almost half of the incidents Deepwatch responded to in 2023 involved account takeover and suspicious activities, doesn’t it seem like we should be seizing the day on this?
So this year we’ve chosen to. If you head over to our April Fools’ Day page – I promise, no Rick-rolling, I’d never tell a lie and hurt you – you’ll find some resources. These include some propaganda-style posters to download and share to help you carry the April Fools’ Day spirit with you year-round as you apply the same level of wariness to those text messages from your CEO on Thursday, July 16th as you would have today on April 1st.
Share these far and wide and, who knows, maybe April Fools’ Day can become the official cyber resilience celebration day. Instead of reveling in practical jokes we can take stock of how we and our friends, families, and coworkers have become harder to dupe with social engineering, phishing, and other attacks. Who knows, this holiday could even surpass Fruitcake Toss Day4 in a few years.
1 Can you believe Farscape is 25 years old?
2 And who could forget Wossamotta U’s most famous football program alumnus, Bullwinkle J. Moose?
3 No, you really wouldn’t, I just wrote that to be polite.4 We didn’t make that one up. Honest.
Bill Bernard is a seasoned security expert with 20+ years of experience collaborating with customers to select and deploy the right security solutions for their business. Bill has held various solutions architecture roles throughout his career and holds a variety of security certifications including CISSP, CIPP-E and CIPM.
His coworkers think he looks a lot like John Tuttle, and his work so far has been outstanding. When he’s not busy working his way up the corporate ladder at Deepwatch, Tha Bot can be found nearly everywhere on Social Media and in the ether. He lives and works “around” Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.
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