Good afternoon everyone and welcome welcome to the stocks will show live I'm going to do a market review here at the spy and I guess I'm going to do one in the QQQs as well then after this in a separate video I know everyone now probably Watching this market Thinks that this is doing a major correction or is going to do a major correction that this is the start of a major Correction that we're going to have a big correction and the market's going to come in I Don't I don't see it. Okay. Now. Let's just go back in time here The market rallied up here made new highs came in okay rallied up here completely reversed a hundred percent this bearish gap down That happened back here in July is the middle of July rallied over this followed through hire gapped up made a new high Okay, everything looks good never got to the $200 number I said it would go put in a less than a buck of that number here. This is July 24th Market failed in a buy set up here And this was a sign then the market was going to have some kind of pull-in. I thought it would hold better in here It didn't how did I know market gap down here mark gap down here and actually fell this day I actually had you know pretty much a power trend bearish day in here back on the 31st You could have shorted, you know a million things actually made money here in this day This is 31st was last week But I really was surprised to see that gap fall in there and was wondering if it was going to have the thought for a hold Well, the next day got up Market gap down and I thought it would hold in here But we tried in the morning. We failed. We ended up closing neutral and the next day We gapped up gapped up here held yesterday I did call this accurately yesterday as far as the hold had a nice green day rally You could have bought the market didn't quite get up to 194 50 or 195. It had a nice move But the market would gap up this morning We didn't have the energy to do and not only did we not there to get up We actually got down the market did gap down close the night before last night at 193 89 and got down got down here at One where did we open 193 10? We got down like 80 cents So to have a look a bit bearish this about this morning in the way we were gapping But I still thought that we had a potential to hold today Let's just look at how we did trade here for most of the morning Pretend you didn't see this This is all here in the morning. We held we held we held we held we held I thought we just hold neutral basically holding not really going anywhere higher But not going lower holding here today But then something came out about Russia and going worth you terrain There was negative news out there and then the market fell the market fell broke the loan has happened late This was late 130 in the afternoon is late for the market to make any kind of move like this And 130 is not any type of major reversal time It was just a reaction then a renewed reaction that happened and the market was hanging on Not great today. I mean it was hanging on but not like amazingly well or anything Like the market was gonna rally up over yesterday's high in the afternoon even if this news reaction hadn't happened So any instigator to make the market fall in here because it was showing having us today It just it didn't need much. It didn't take much. It didn't need much I didn't take it at all and it just went okay It was a quick move down though into an area and bounce now. I know we broke Alright, I mean the numbers are showing that we actually broke under 57 here, but this counts as a hold to me Okay, this is what I would look at as I hold Okay, and I just know we're not gonna break this bearish this a bullish gap So this bullish gap that happened back here at 527 the low of that gap is 195 and I we're just not gonna break it We are just not gonna break that gap and we are right there So this is the end of the bullet and I know that people are thinking everywhere in the planet that the market's gonna come in And it's gonna come in and it's gonna keep coming in it's gonna come all the way in here could that happen Yes, it's gonna happen. No, I don't think so. I believe this bullish gap significant here that happened on May 27th I believe this holds this market up and we're I guess we're gonna wait and see you know to be honest with you We're gonna know tomorrow It's not gonna take long to find out Because we're gonna break lower and break that gap. We're gonna do it tomorrow And we'll even gap neutral gap down and fall but I think that we hold So we'll have to find out and see where we got tomorrow and I'll read the gap in the market tomorrow to know Okay, tricky times in here because everybody wants to start shorting people are short this market now There are people that are short this market now people that shorted this gap that happened here And there was some follow-through and I know people shorted this in here and for all intents and purposes This looks like a daily sell set up where the market triggered in here today when it fell when it fell in 195 the market looks like it's triggered in daily sell so that the market really isn't triggering on a daily sell set Because this market's going to hold it's gonna be a fake out and my read on this is that we hold now after today And I know I said the yesterday and I said the day before But that's my read on this that this is the end of whatever correction would have been and I thought there would be a very Small correction if any or really not anything would be like one red bar or two red bars like I thought that would be it Like I was even thinking this was the end that was it that was all the correction We're gonna get now we did get this nice gap that happened in here that fall through the day But this is it buying is gonna step in this market here And I don't know where but I do believe it's soon now because I'm looking at this picture here And I know people think we're gonna break people think the market's extended people think we're gonna break people Then we're gonna fall under one ninety one eighty eight one eighty six people even think we're gonna get down to 180 People think this market's gonna break. I don't see it happening I don't see it happening if I see it happening in a gap in a gap that happens I get up tomorrow morning Wednesday morning Thursday morning Friday morning I'll read it live time in the trading room and I'll see it live But I don't see that happening here as of the close of business today My read right now on August 5th at 4 o'clock Eastern time the way this buy closer today is gonna hold and that sounds crazy Because of the way that we traded with a red bar today But I think this is the end of whatever Correction or pull in the market was going to get and I don't even think it would be this big Okay, so this is like plenty here. We are still gonna get up and making a high We're still gonna get up and hit the number over 200 We're gonna hit that both the number 200 and when we do make a new high It will blow through all these people that are short in this market now That should not be short this because the market's in an uptrend and the market is strong and this gap that happened here was Temporary not permanent meaning doesn't break this chart in any directional bias that moves it down Could we come all the way down here? Yes if we did with a market we bearish. No, no it wouldn't but this is a stronger hold in here So that's where I'm looking for it to happen. Could we have held in here? Yes Was this is how important of an area as this no If you don't know how to read gaps you wouldn't even know what you're looking at here Which I do so I know what I'm seeing and I guess we're gonna find out tomorrow It's really not gonna take long, but my call is here that this market holds after today And I said the last two days, but this is actually doesn't count is great I was a news reaction thing that happened today at 130 and that's it Okay, and people are just desperate to short this market anyway So anytime something happens like people at one is short to short But I'm telling you the the longs the bulls are gonna step in they're gonna come in they're gonna Come in and they're gonna come in hard. Okay, and Beautifully whenever it happens. So for those people like to go long We know when you know how to read this here There'll be a position or in placement to go long in here soon To get the market up over a new high But you know, honestly people don't want to go long should be long in this market anyways And everybody that's taking profits out here on these red bars with markets coming in that are selling out of stuff It's gonna be sorry because I did say a couple videos ago I said it in a bunch of videos actually back in July and maybe even in June and now here We are in August again timing is always something because I'm reading stuff in real lifetime I trade every day and I read the gaps and I read the market trading in live time I'm very good at reading it live to see what's happening if something changes if it does this it does that But I must have really good at seeing what's gonna happen in the long term although the long term I can't always predict the exact day as I'm is gonna hit the target in the long term But I'm telling the spy is gonna hit over 200 and everything I said in the prior videos It's still intact the market is gonna hit some crazy number this year before the end of the calendar year The market is gonna go so I hit some crazy number that no one is gonna expect No one is even gonna think it was even possible Market is gonna blow over 200 and rally up to some crazy number I don't know who and but it's going to do with this year And it's gonna be something that people will not expect and the way that this is shaping up here Okay, is really giving people an air thinking that this market is gonna turn or has turned Which it hasn't or people gonna think that it is gonna turn which it's not and that's gonna bring in people making some decisions here that You know, I think you're gonna be problematic because no one should be shorting this market But people are people definitely aren't you have to know what you're doing when you trade I can't I cannot you have to know how to read price. I mean, I actually was called somebody Dave at the class and The man said he couldn't talk he was he was in so many trades in the market was falling like a brick And he was in all these trades.  I felt bad for it But, you know, so I quickly got off the phone with them But anyways training is one of these things where if you want to trade and take risk You absolutely without a shot of the doubt have to learn what to do I never never traded fear and I don't trade like I'm scared and and I'm not worried Even if I take a position if I get stopped out and I lose I know what I'm gonna lose in it And I have a stop in to hear that panic in that man's voice we're so many people are training and they have no idea what they're doing and it's It's actually shocking to me actually It's actually shocking and That kind of panic it hurts your physical body hurts your emotions That kind of stress I would never want to trade if I felt like that kind of stress when I take my trains I have conviction in them. It's not stressful. I do them. They either work or they don't I'm not in a panic mode I could never treat if every single day was panic mode or even two out of three out of five days at a month We're panic mode. I'm fine with the risks that I take. I'm fine with the trades that I take I believe in that and when one or two don't work. It's not a big deal Train and relax fashion and Julie what you're doing. This is fun people. It's fun Okay, and if it's not fun, then I don't I don't know why some people do it I would never want to stress myself out like that. Anyways, this is gonna hold and Don't train unless you know how don't risk money in the market It's your harder money unless you know how and I'm teaching people how to do it So if you want to come learn from me, you can email me my email list Melissa at the stocks wish calm We'll see how the market gaps tomorrow morning. They'll tell me a lot here But by reading this right now the close of business on August 5th is the market holds here This is the end of this move here this down move and the markets gonna do something could even do it in the gap tomorrow And it's the classes this weekend email me and Melissa at the stocks wish that plan if you'd like more information to sign up for the class Talk to you later


Life is good all this month at Appalachian Wireless. Get the LG G5 for just one penny with signup or renewal of a two-year service agreement. That's almost $100 off the regular price. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. If you were looking to step back in time Tuesday night, you couldn't do much better than Prestonsburg Elementary School, where students brought history to life with the American History Wax Museum. You might find Abraham Lincoln sharing an aisle with Robert E. Lee, and a pair of faces from even more recent history. Teachers say the project has been one students not only learned from, but enjoy as well. We've been doing this for quite a while. The students take a historical figure that they're interested in. They do the research on it.  That's the main thing that we want them to know. She helped union soldiers whenever they collapsed in wars, and she did the Red Cross. I figured out that he battled down here at Middle Creek, Kentucky, and that he only was the second shortest term of president in the United States. She wrote a lot of poems and plays in history, plus she was a political writer. Well, she inspired me because she loves animals, and I love animals, too. She was famous for helping chimpanzees in their survival off. Teachers say the Wax Museum is a big hit with the kids, and that it fosters learning not only for the participating students, but for the younger kids who get to see it as well. They'll tell you they're a little nervous, but they really love it, and they remember it. And then when the other students come from the other grades, these kids have said this so many times that they know it by heart, and they actually listen to them. So then they learn. The American History Wax Museum is an annual occurrence at Prestonsburg Elementary School, and this year it even had the side benefit of uniting better political rivals. Reporting from Prestonsburg for EKB News, I'm Jackson Laddum.


you saw me struggle with what my thoughts were to write because I wasn't sure what I wanted to write, and then when I started writing, that just sounded really all kinds of wrong to me. So, but I got it. I got it. All right. Sometimes the prompts are more of a struggle than others, and especially in the current situation that the world is in, it's hard to think of the light, notice the light, stay positive, like all of those things. If you're struggling, you're not the only one. But one of the reasons I started this exercise was to remind myself that there is some light out there somewhere, even on days when I have trouble seeing it. So there you go. If you're inspired by this project to do something similar with your December daily, I sure would love to see it, or a positive affirmation journal of any kind, do share. You can join one or both of my two Facebook art groups to share over there if you want. Tag me in the post if you do, so I can make sure to see it. Of course, you can put something on Instagram or something like that. Again, tag me in the post that I can see it. I'd appreciate that. If you want to follow me on any of those things, join the Facebook art group, support the free content here on YouTube, any of those things. All the links for that are in the video description, some of which are in my link tree list of links, which is in the video description. I also would really, really love if you guys like, share, and subscribe. And if you have a favorite content creator here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups that you would love to support, check out their video description or their about page in a Facebook art group. See if there's a way for you to do that. If you can't find a way, message them and ask. I know they don't really appreciate that, especially this year and this holiday season. Please be safe, be healthy, be creative. Please wear a mask.  And I'll see you later. Bye, guys.


future holds and this is the 19th of 20 conversations and then we're going to take a mix break which we'll speak about at the end but yeah the very little to say today except that just keep coming back to these conversations and see the previous conversations if you can they're all on the website they've become an amazing tome of knowledge provided one can sit through them and sift through them and without further ado Neil thank you for being here many thank you for curating this and take it away thank you Jayhan hi everyone and very excited to have you here again as usual good to see some familiar faces and yeah so today's discussion we're going to be talking with Neil Coppin about collaborative theater making and participatory justice or collaborative theater making as participatory justice um Neil is a writer director and activist based in Durban South Africa in 2011 he was named the standard bank young artist for drama and featured on the men and guardians 200 most influential young South Africans more recently Coppin has been awarded the out of Shriner prize for drama um Coppin's work has been performed internationally and his plays are taught in schools and universities in South Africa abroad and some of his most acclaimed ones include Tin Bucket Drum, Tree Boy at Normal Lords, His Bottle Bottle and New Family and his all-female cast adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm to the country for a substantial amount of time and Neil has more recently served as a dramaturg for Canada's leading contemporary indigenous dance company and has recently also just worked on reimagining of Hamlet for the Fugart Theatre in Cape Town. Those are kind of the professional directorial kind of products but the focus of today's discussion turns more towards Neil's kind of more recent substantial project which is a company called Empathyator that is based outside of Durban and we will learn a little more about the kind of work that they do and the kind of impulses that shape the kinds of I guess interventions that Empathyator is invested in making but we thought that it would be interesting to kind of start us off with just a short clip that kind of gives us a little kind of background on what Empathyator does and also the kind of glimpse of the kind of aesthetics I guess and what the work kind of looks like so if you'll indulge us I know it's a rather unusual way to start our process but yeah so this will be a couple of minutes and then Neil we will we will move on swiftly just after this. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Complex problems in unequal societies require careful yet rigorous explorations of different ways of knowing, being and doing. When popular and political debates are polarized and filled with judgments entangled livelihoods and marginalized voices are often ignored. It's why we believe that creative and empathetic methods can facilitate multiple forms of listening to and sharing knowledge across diverse publics. Empathyator is one such method. Emerging from the South African context Empathyator has over the past five years developed innovative new ways of constructing social spaces for equitable public dialogue creating an amphitheater for empathy that embraces rather than shies away from complex entanglements in society. Since 2014 the Empathyator team has tackled social concerns ranging from land-based mining and displacement, street-level drug addiction, the vulnerability of migrant women and the impacts of xenophobia, gentrification and public housing conflicts and more recently ocean heritage and governance. Empathyator nurtures not only public storytelling but a tent of story listening. This research-based theater method offers a new form of participatory justice in decision-making, meaning-making and solidarity building across societal spheres. The Empathyator process begins with extensive action-based research. Here the creative team, co-participants and key partners work to identify matters of critical concern for social justice and together define a pressing central question. The Empathyator team then set out to explore this question with as many people from diverse backgrounds as possible listening to multiple narratives that relate to the topic from different scales and positionalities interrogating archives and reading broadly. The creative team then bring these findings together and works to shape the research into an engrossing, relevant and true-to-life theatrical script. The initial iteration of the script is first shared with participants and partners in table readings and other formats to test and verify the credibility of the play. The Empathyator team then devise and rehearse a theatrical production and share this again with relevant knowledge holders from a variety of backgrounds. In this way the team are continuously enriching and verifying the research. Once the project collaborators are happy with the production, performances are rolled out to strategic audiences across the country. Policymakers, participants and other concerned publics are invited to sit together and experience the production. Empathyator audiences are generally made up of people with different levels of agency, power and privilege in relation to the matter of concern being explored in the play. Ideally invited audience members should hold diverse even conflicting views on the central concern represented. Post-play conversations are then carefully facilitated as public dialogues between the audience the actors and playmakers allowing for yet another layer of research in consultation with the public to emerge. Since its inception Empathyator productions have reached thousands of South Africans with performances opening international conferences, community meetings and theater festivals. Venues for Empathyator performances have ranged from state-of-the-art theaters and art galleries to church and school halls, police stations, football fields, aquariums, rehabilitation centers and homeless shelters. Across these various processes Empathyator works to amplify a chorus of voices, particularly those of marginalized groups. With and for our non-academic research partners in powerful and validating ways. Moving forward Empathyator is expanding into international policy dialogue as well as further grassroots engagements aiming to deepen and enrich our ability to support democratic decision-making processes. If you would like to join these efforts get involved donate or learn more please visit our website at www.empathyator.com. Lovely, thank you. That clip was pretty effective at kind of mapping out what is emerging to me certainly as a kind of method and as a kind of formal set of practices right that that are geared towards as you say you know engendering different ways of knowing, being and doing through performance. And it's quite clear that the kind of work that Empathyator is doing is obviously animated by a deep investment in a particular kind of politics, a kind of different modalities of justice that are in some ways trying to respond to these various histories of unequal distribution of power of agency and these various other things. And that seems you know quite self-evident right at the top. But before we kind of sink our teeth into that kind of work specifically and perhaps talking more a little about what the process looks like and the kinds of things that you know that that that attracted you since kind of work in the first place. I'm interested in talking a little about this kind of shift from well I don't know if it's a shift but in the kind of you come from a kind of straight theatrical background right where you began interpreting and kind of staging other kind of works, pre-written scripts and so forth. And that worked for Fornt of the Bedouid system what one might loosely call the popular realm where people can kind of engage with the work that they aren't necessarily being compelled to recognize that there's a kind of physical gesture even if they might be and there often is right in the so-called straight theater. And then you have this other thing which is very clearly emanated by as I said this kind of deep investment in kind of social justice issues and so forth. So I'm interested in how and perhaps why you found the need to move in the other direction or move towards this other space and how you've kind of managed to kind of hold those two spaces for yourself as a writer, as a director, as a theater maker. Kind of balancing out that need for the popular and kind of audience building and that kind of open public that we desire but also without diminishing or stepping away from the need to do work through the theater. I suppose it just I think it working in South Africa as a theater maker gets to the point where you can't you can't just do that festival circuit and the pop the mainstream theater scene and I don't know get away with it anymore. I felt like it was just it was just such a limiting space you were preaching to the converted to a certain sector of society could afford to come to the theater in the first place and attend to it. It felt like you would go through all this work. I mean my theater making and whatever format it's been has always been extremely research based. It would take five years of a gestation and research before I even created my what you might term my more popular theater or mainstream theater. So I was always doing that kind of accumulation of research but then you would either get to tour to a theater or two or three theater festivals if you're lucky and the play would also just die. It felt like a kind of I couldn't go any further than that and it was again who is in my audiences who is attending to this work who are we able to have conversations with yeah and it felt like incredibly limiting and exclusionary that the kind of the mainstream theater circuit scene. So yeah there just became a point where I was like if I want to remain in this world of storytelling and storytelling to really feel like I'm learning from it all the time as well as storytelling has you know been able to have a wider impact and theater being able to be a more accessible and democratic kind of conversational tool needed to shift. So I think that became very very much yeah I something else something needed to give. I was also doing a lot of work with what are deemed problematically community theater groups, community theater performers in Komashu and around KwaZulu Natal. I was on a project called The Twist Project where I was assigned to collaborate with different groups every year and I was so excited by seeing what was going on there and the incredible talent and storytelling abilities and also this inherent need to address social concerns in all those works but as and while attending them and being a part of all these processes and meeting all these group leaders and directors and theater makers it also became apparent that like when we're dealing with social concerns how are we doing it? Are we necessarily imparting something new? I could see that there was some sort of new sort of collaboration that might be exciting where we challenge each other around how we choose to articulate social concerns and moving away from just the didactic or the polemical and what would it mean if we really place research at the center of a process before the theater making even begins? The same time I was doing my masters and understanding the kind of limits of academia and the frustrations of the academic world for me in the sense that all this research happens it ends up in a thesis and dies a horrible death on someone's desk or on a shelf somewhere after all of that work and all of that insight that's generated and how can we take research and what are the forms how can we use storytelling as a form of kind of dissemination in where this research can really matter and count and really be accessible you don't need a PhD to understand what the hell it's talking about so all of these different strands started playing on my imagination I was working with the most extraordinary performer and pulmium timbani who considers herself as sort of traditional healer but using theater and storytelling as her healing I also met Dr Dylan McGarry who was a sociologist has done his PhD in empathy and social sculpture and all these forces kind of started coalescing and we came up with some processes and started experimenting and that just started growing and growing into variety of different theater projects and outputs oh that's so exciting you know because you know one of the anxieties that I certainly feel as a practitioner who is based in academia is exactly this tension right between I guess the exercise of of theater making and performance making all these other things as part of an international or kind of theoretical investigation of politics in the world um and as I say you know it's somebody who's just recently completed a PhD too I'm well aware of that anxiety of this thing sitting on the shelves and thank not keen for people to read it right I'm okay with that but I'm also aware that there's some extraordinary investment in knowledge production that ends up staying in relatively kind of limited circles or limited spaces and in many instances you pointed out earlier we had a pretense required to write so our work ends up perhaps not being as effective at addressing the very things that that that it's focused on as it might be um so I find this this idea really exciting um because before for one thing you kind of found a way to leverage that kind of space of of the research and and the kind of thoroughgoing investigative elements of of of of um what you know somebody like me would ordinarily do as they bread and butter but you're using that as a stepping stone to producing a kind of work that is aesthetically and ethically grounded in a slightly different place um I'm really interested in how the actual company right and by coming together so you said that you you met um Dylan and um how did the kind of thinking around the organization itself and and and kind of projects that you'd be drawn towards kind of come together I'm I'm interested in that kind of the formalization I guess of of what is emerging I suppose the bit the implement I were working on a variety of projects and like I said my my theater making's always been research-based and it takes a very long time often they will outside of my own that demand a rigor and a deeper a far deeper understanding and a collaborative sense of storytelling in the way that I've never believed in the kind of master playwright director the hierarchy's narrative that that writing can only be a connective process for me it and I've just done a piece around sexuality um with a friend of mine Seizwa and Yahan and Afrikant and a Zulu friend whose two realities uh these men had never met but their realities and in the stories they were telling me about their lives were so uh fascinating to kind of devise a theatrical scenario to bring these two worlds together and explore what would happen if they would meet and you know tease out the parallels and as well as the complexities nuances and differences in those stories but I was using theater making the art the imaginary realm to then yeah explore what it would mean to put stories that ordinarily don't happen together or meet or collide and in that way um and again finding those parallels so I was playing a lot with that pulmena was very involved in these processes with me and then we were approached by Imsen velo a very problematic conservation organization here in Pozil and Ital around the Shashlui Game Reserve which is a big wilderness area up in the northern Zulu land and the initial brief was you know we hear you do you do theater and you do research but there's a community um the Fulani community that live up there on the border of our Nash on this wildlife game reserve and the community are currently facing a major critical decision of whether to sign away their land or not their ancestral land where the community was built to sign it away to a mining company that was coercing different leaders within the community sowing a lot of division and rifts and trying this kind of decision was coming very soon where the community would have to make a collective decision to vote whether we move away from the land give away our ancestral land for this giant coal mine to be built or do we say no and there was a lot of confusion a lot of tension a lot of violence starting to happen within the community the Imsen velo wildlife were putting a lot of pressure on the community to obviously say no um you know don't you this is going to impact the wildlife and the national park that will be a you know if this mine comes so there was a lot of complex different things happening there um and a community very much divided about what to do obviously a mine seemed like an appetizing possibility around employment uh we said toms and velo we wouldn't take any of their money because we'd not theater for development company we don't take a message and then push it on people the research needs to happen from the ground and that research then needs to be shared with all the stakeholders that's the only way we work and if there's any kind of ulterior funding moating of pushing an agenda on on something that's not not what we do we're not an advertising company so we went in and we sent some a company of zulu actors up to a community around the corner from feleni who had faced the same decision around do we sell out you know hand over the land sign it away they've promised they'll move us relocate us to a new community where they'll build even better amenities etc etc and so we thought let's just go do a case study with the actors living in that community which is called some kele not far from feleni and just listen to the stories about what happened did those promises from the mining company materialize etc etc the actors obviously went to live there gathered these stories and we simply created a piece that tried to articulate all these different complexities and we got the opportunity to perform that theater piece in sdzulu at the final big endava function out in a tent in a field for hundreds of community members again it wasn't just about advocacy and pushing and don't vote for the mind but looking at all the different complexities we also understood that the more we interviewed about the wildlife park obviously people were like well that's that's not an option for us either that employs about 20 people where the mind's promising deploy employees 600 so there were so many different nuances and complexities that we needed to try and sum up in an hour long theater production and we learned a lot of lessons by that but also this production tended to have a really exciting impact on how people were thinking and also theater is the kind of form of conflict resolution because what was happening was the community and how the mining companies work is they like to fracture and splinter that community that's exactly what we've seen going on in the wild coast and all it's the story of the world sewing internal divisions you know giving a chief a whole lot of money in the community but that the rest of the people never see or never materializes into anything for them and so yeah that was the challenge and then we got to perform this and and it was so much more effective obviously than in a power point but it also allowed the post discussion to happen and we know this about theater and conflict resolution is that rather than blaming your neighbor or talking more directly about people around you you're able to articulate your frustration or thoughts by using the characters and the play itself as a scenario to describe those things um and again we set a scenario of a mother who was stuck between two sons one was for the mine one was against and it was this family drama modeled on Zulu radio plays that are very popular in the region so we took a kind of popular form of dissemination but really tried to subvert that from within with a much more complex look at these problems and then asking the community there what do you want how do you want to you know making that a much bigger discussion forming a charter that was not based on what the wildlife company wanted or the mining company but what did the people actually want what what's their vision for that community and by playing with that kind of early project and seeing the results and seeing the effects and and working with activists in the region and how exciting they found emotive storytelling like this and its power um a company kind of started forming and and I had been very interested after that in Woonga this heroin drug that was exploding in Quasalina at the time in an unprecedented sort of way and the next project we tackled was well let's look at Woonga let's try and understand street-level drug addiction in Quasalina and that became another whole project and and so they started rolling on from that and more and more lessons were acquired with each project we did more exciting ways of evolving the methodology the way of working advocacy strategies and storytelling and that's become the kind of yep journey we've been on for the last five or six years now. Oh excellent thanks Neil um yeah so that I mean it's very clear that there's a range of different spaces politics I guess social situations and scenarios that the method allows you to intervene and it's clear that the stories are kind of grounded in a closer tension to things happening on the ground to you know kind of different communal experiences of these these kind of difficult politics as they play out in the real world. So I'm wondering how you arrive at the stories and make choices of which stories to tell and to investigate further um and also identifying the issues in communities where you conceive the work is needing to happen right um and I see Jayhan you've you've popped a question into the chat and that's absolutely something I'm interested in as well and I'll ask you to um give us that in a second but if um yeah we could just kind of quickly think about that quickly um yeah how do you arrive at the stories that you're talking um I mean is it a process of going out and just kind of recognizing that there are these issues broadly or is it through kind of close conversation where people you know are more intimately related to you in your life that then open up to those other communities um um yeah constantly um I get the opportunity to constantly do workshop with young theater makers and storytellers from all over Pozzolini and his life crimes so one of the I learned it was an exercise we did in a royal court writing residency I was part of for some time and it was a wonderful exercise of just like one of the five most important things to you as young theater makers writers the five most pressing concerns that you face right now in your community um and we write those down everyone gets a chance to say the five things that they feel most urgently need to be addressed or impacting them or need to be discussed or unpacked further and it becomes then after we've listed all these things we kind of do a short list of let's choose five now that we all collected that the group collectively feels and for example the Wunga the heroine project about street level drug addiction in all the workshop I was doing the number one problem at that time that was surfacing there was Wunga Wunga and you know what are you how are we going to address this how are we going to do this in our theater making and storytelling around that um that became a much bigger research project you could also see it very tangibly in Pozzolini tell where I live just on the streets everywhere was this problem you could see it mushroom these these sorts of traffic islands of users that were kind of expelled from their homes that were congregating I mean it was a very visible the parks and the cities suddenly just became burgeoning uh kind of places for users to gather and um people who had been kicked out of their communities because of their drug use problems and it just growing and growing and you could physically see it you could see it in the headlines on the lamp post the letters to the newspaper so one is able to really see what's concerning people what's on their minds and also how problematically the media are talking about these things I did a kind of analysis at the time to try to see if this was a project maybe worth exploring further of just the words the media were using around drug use in the city and how they were kind of the the amount of terminology that related users to zombies and werewolves and ghouls and you know this apocalyptic narrative of really dehumanizing users further and further um so it takes a lot of different analysis I mean that that was a project then I went to a komar shuk theater group and I said does wunga interest you and affect you and is that something you would like to talk about in theater this group were like of course we'd be my neighbors family members everyone spoke very personally about how it was impacting them and from then we were able to say well let's get together and do a year and a half research process of trying to understand this problem um not just from the perspective of a neighbor or a user but let's go speak to police let's speak to social workers let's speak to activists let's do a year long just listening to the stories attending to those stories first before even trying to devise some sort of theatrical output or shaping an advocacy strategy through the theater let's just listen and that project was incredibly incredibly dense and rich in a way there were seven of us involved in the team and Pume was also she was from Imlazi which where the problem was manifesting in a different way to how it was in komar shuk and we were bringing this together meeting every few weeks to just talk through the research to do improvisation exercises to realize where the gaps of knowledge were and as this was going on we were forming partnerships with a homeless shelter in the center of Durban with academics who were researching the problem we were just trying to understand it from all of the different angles and then try and articulate that complexity through the creation of a theatrical production and then looking at well now we've got this theater production we're speaking to all these problems we played it back to all the informants who who who have uh granted their stories for us to use how do we you know the problem became what this is and my problem with the idea of just theater of the oppressed is that what about the oppressor if we're not using theater to actually challenge and change oppressive behaviors then really what is how is transformation or change ever going to be possible through storytelling unless we really try yeah trying to work at higher levels and not just preaching to the so-called converted not just mirroring back people's realities as they are to them because people will watch it and say yeah I know that that's my story and I feel honored that it's been seen and presented like this but tell me something I don't know right now you know one of the first yeah the biggest challenge became we're like how can we stop moving these stories then into into spaces of power and agency agency to really impact how policy is made um and that a wemble became a really exciting project and that we were invited to parliament to perform it for the heads of you know drug policymakers within government it started climbing very high levels of power where this play was performed and unpacked it was invited to drug conferences around the world in New York where the play was used as a really fascinating and interesting kind of starting point for conversation um and that became really exciting to us was like yeah how do we move these stories into spaces where they need to be attended to and they can actually start shifting how people are um you know defining their policies around and that became you know connecting to harm reduction strategies etc etc and the project just kept growing and changing the more the more more recent strands kind of immersion to it so we might you know I was approached by the open society around another project on corruption where they were pairing theater makers with um with journalists who were doing exposing corruption uh that social housing the project around gentrification in Cape Town and social housing boxes emerged out of that for example saying you know pair up with a journalist who's exposing and in this case it was corruption within the democratic uh the the democratic party in in Cape Town around land and you know the exclusionary practices and so kind of social segregation that from apartheid that happened in city planning and was continuing so that became the point of entry there it's like reading the journalist research and then realizing oh there's definitely a sort of empathy it's a project in this so they come to us in different ways um and but you certainly see what's in consciousness what's in the news what's on people's minds and and where the political acupuncture points I think um we need to kind of target uh become quite clear through the process of listening yeah thank you um Catherine was asking that you speak in more detail about your process of listening and story gathering collaboration which I guess is one of the questions that we're going to kind of engage with anyway is is what does this look like right um and to lean into and kind of sit with this idea of of empathy and deep listening and careful listening as as ethical points of entry into doing work right that's basically kind of ethical a way of relating differently to the people with whom you're working um and we'll circle back I'm sure to kind of come and go and in terms of the conversation but something that just came up now as as as we're kind of thinking is it seems to me that you're you're also very aware of um relative position right um that people in the process first of the process is constituted as one that that that um initiates encounters between different stakeholders people who come from different kinds of places in order to kind of have that conversation right um but it also seems that in that awareness I guess of the differentials of power with which we enter into this space and those sorts of engagements um I'm interested in you know how did you engage with the challenge for example around um gosh how do I put this around being cognizant of I think the compulsion to enter into a kind of savior narrative um that is often one of the side effects I think of as well intentioned as we may be um of our desire to kind of make work useful to other people is that we then often kind of slip into this well I'm the person of knowledge I'm arriving and I mean to help you save yourself at best if not me directly saving you right and and not to put too fine a point on it but in a country like South Africa especially you know the kind of um racial history that that already announces itself before you even started talking already positions you're really complicated raised I think to the the diverse communities that you're working with so I'm I'm interested in thinking a little about how empathy listening carefully this destabilization of hierarchies that we you know announced right at the beginning as a mode of working how that helps us maybe think about how to address those those those unequal distributions of power that may have perhaps an undesirable effect on on um on the work being done right because it ends up kind of centralizing the imperial subject what are the better phrase right um and the others kind of become local flavor rather than anything else so it seems to me that that there's there's there's an explicit relationship in terms of I mean it says so in the name right empathy um between empathy and the ways that you're choosing to do the work and how that asks us to I think imagine ourselves and orient ourselves differently in terms of power right within the rehearsal space within the collaborative space um Catherine I hope I haven't butchered your question by by adding a whole lot of bits and pieces to it um but yeah so so empathy and and and and kind of careful listening as an ethical point of entry into the making I think fascinates me I think to to respond to there's so many parts of that question so remind me if there's anything I need to touch on but to start with the kind of listening and positionalities of the team itself and acknowledging um that the powers privileges different forms of agency or not within the group that's obviously essential starting point it's why the production like I say is is collectively researched by the team for around about a year or more before any semblance of a script or play idea happens it's uh the biggest lesson I've learned in the most exciting part it's by no means new in theater practice but certainly it has a profound impact on the kind of work we do and the nuance and insight and and authenticity if you with all the problems that word comes with is establishing a team where this problem is direct where the actors become ethnographers essentially the actors are the researchers so the actors are involved from and and team members are involved from the research to the developing of the characters to the strategizing of the story play plot what the theater production becomes um obviously in a production like a wimble I'm not going to go and interview people within Qomashu and it's I want to understand about drug use and stuff like that the Qomashu actors had family members as the starting point neighbors who were drug dealers friends who were users runners that they could directly access an interview as a starting point Dylan had access to the more academic kind of structures doing his ph having done his phd he was able to do a postdoc within the urban future center around drug use too so he could enrich our understandings from a very academic what's the latest research emerging in Durban in the city are from that frame of reference uh and Pumir was she was interested in woman in the police force how they were dealing with this problem woman who also mothers of sons who may be users and how would that complexity manifest if you were forced to police this problem in a certain way but then your own son is using and you discover that halfway through the story and she has to readdress all the misconceptions and all the ways she's been you know treating the problem and policing it by physically you know there's a scene in the opening of the play where she catches a young user her son's age and forces them to eat his own stash which is what a lot of users were telling us was happening in the police force at the time um and so we're able to look at it from all these different these different chorus of voices and um again you can only do that if if the actors are from within the community or the story you're exploring have access to the language the knowledge the traditions the culture cultural aspects um we couldn't begin to speak on behalf of that my job is to more open up a space and and a starting point for a conversation and try and hold all those different strands that are emerging and together we collectively try and navigate how that should coalesce into a story how do we condense a year of all this insane research into an hour-long experience that can begin to speak to those complexities and that that becomes a challenge um but I find the actors creating the characters themselves by virtue of listening to people that they will then embody and play in the production itself has such a profound effect on the work on the authenticity of the way they hold those characters of allowing us to avoid stereotypes or melodrama by imagining rather this is a deep form of research where the actor themselves is is acquiring that story and honoring that informant with the character they create and put on the stage it creates a new sort of respect um with how you portray that story and how you want to honor that person who's been prepared to be vulnerable and open themselves up to telling you their story there's a lot of ethical complexities of course in this sort of work as as there is with any academic sort of research we do we have a kind of code of conduct a code of ethics uh that has been written um one of uh our colleagues Taryn Pereira at Rhodes has has got a few points which I love we work with with all of our our collaborators um some of these points are just worth mentioning do not harm but don't be afraid of a little generous of tension waste no one's time be trans transparent not invisible contribute what you can time resources network skills access and care listen observe and then help to articulate what is happening make space for others to articulate describe explain and strategize acknowledge and celebrate the undervalued work of activists and spaces that we're working in expose injustices when you encounter them after seeking mandate to do so and to create new opportunities for understanding growth and change so we try to work with principles they're constantly growing as we learning um we do you know everyone there's it like with academic research there's a consent form there's a deep understanding of what I'm lending to my story to do I consent to this story being used in this way the stories are then played back to all the informants before they go to rehearsal so everyone can see how they've been represented and comment back and talk back to that and laugh changes happen so it's it's the ethics of care and very careful delicate work understanding all these juggling acts one is it's kind of trying to balance in this process I'm not saying it's a perfect one and there's always room for improvement and new understanding and reworking what we're doing um that's constantly happening um but yeah I hope I've touched on some of some of those no no no and and and I love that kind of I guess list of of of news and documents um primarily because they seem so practical to me um that there's that kind of bit of poetry don't what's it don't be be transparent but not invisible and all this sort of I like that there are the kind of these these very explicit practical hooks that that perhaps um help us to orient ourselves in that space and in that environment and recognize the kind of dynamic books I play uh there was the question actually it's come up twice now um Jaehan you you asked about fundraising to let the community's own voices and stories be heard and then when you're also asked further down about fundraising I guess that also connects to a question that I have you know um is work of the size and scale right because unlike again a kind of straight in terms of where kind of a standard theater work right where maybe you'll be working on something for six weeks you have these incredibly long timelines that involve research that involve deep investigation in communities um and you know iteration seems to be a large part of what you're doing and how you're doing it like this is kind of turning the crystal over and over and over again to kind of look at the thing through different facets seems like a deeply luxurious way to work and one that I'm eminently jealous of um and I guess that that's the question right is is is how have you strategically leveraged resources to kind of create the space to be able to do this kind of work I know that from my perspective you know I spend probably 75 percent of the time I hold creative time writing funding applications but it's a very very clear kind of process for me from within academia because I know you know there are specific places that one goes to for funding there are specific kinds of outputs one can expect but it seems that this is because it's a combination of these multiple different things it's kind of a theater company um there's kind of this deep ethnographic process that's happening and kind of literal kind of scientific knowledge production um there's this kind of social interventionist kind of paradigm that's at work as well where the hell does one turn to find people sell on the idea enough for them to be willing to firstly invest in the process but also invest knowing that it's a process and they don't necessarily have an idea of what the product will be at the end because that's often often one of the things that we're tied down to um within these funding paradigms right is that they want to know how long is it um how many times it's going to show how many times is my logo going to appear at the bottom screen with each showing um but you don't necessarily have a place or needs guarantee those those kinds of nuts and bolts of the funding around when you make these applications for funding how do you how do you make work happen and also when you're very clear about that you will not accept funding that is there about enforcing an agenda I mean we could get so much work if we work more theater for development doing government study health you know that kind of health the theater for education health theater that kind of thing where you handed the brochure of what needs to be imparted and find the way to articulate that input that in performance as I've mentioned that is everything we don't do we will say to anyone who's interested in sending us they're going we will tell you after the research has been done within those different spaces uh what's needed not the other way around um and obviously it funders with an agenda or a funding agenda where they want to know what the outcome like I said to we can never tell you what this will be we can't tell you how long it will be how many players characters what the story will be about until that period of research has been done and held by us only then are we able to articulate what the the kind of artistic output will be so you're right it's a it's a much longer process and in this day and age where there's no funding for theater work where do you find funding to do this sort of work and I've been amazed at the budgets the research budgets that go into universities I've never been very much embroiled in the academic world until more recently through these sorts of processes and there's huge funding grants that come to universities by doing this work without much funding in the beginning universities have seen and academia seen how vital this form of dissemination can be for research in making research live beyond the limits of the library shelf in in in the university so there's suddenly a lot of universities like the urban future center who's very dynamic in their thinking and Quasalina tell here who are restructuring budgets to make sure that amphitheater is a major part because it meets a lot of their research mandates but then it also comes with this beautiful idea of well then the research goes out and is able to speak and we're able to get more research by doing the play and then listening to the stories that play generates it's a constant iterative process of surfacing new stories and so often stories that researchers at universities don't have access to I mean the actors and and actors I say make the best ethnographers actors are the our naturally storytellers the actors here in Quasalina tell that we work with are the most extraordinary intuitive researchers intuitive if not you know ethnographers in how they used to working anyway by listening by responding by by collecting and gathering these stories so a lot of those skills are already there quite intuitively so we tack on a lot now to universities through research grants but we are approached saying you know we're doing this this piece on warwick junction on informal trade is down in Durban City we would love for this information that surfaces over this for amphitheater to be a very big part of our budget and we finding that increasingly now people seeing the power of this work and including us in their budgets of obviously we fill out lots of funding applications we're working with the one ocean hub on a on a kind of ocean governance project right now which has been long running there's been funding there from stress guide university that's put into ocean research but we doing the storytelling component of that and so we factored into that budget is kind of permanent employees now through roads on a long empathy at a research project that's generating a whole lot of plays and different storytelling that's that's playing out in policy and conference spaces so it's a hustle I won't lie it doesn't land on your lap it's not that we just get to roll these things out they take a lot of hustling but the more people with agency and power within university systems and within academia that are understanding how what this does to research what this means for research are really throwing their weight and clout behind it and as a result we're getting a whole lot more possibilities for expanding and doing this work it's also a lifetime of funding applications as running any theater company is the problem is the work around social justice work is obviously very critical of government so they're not too willing to jump behind it and you know it doesn't meet their mandates of nation building and all the things you need to take on those boxes and then organizations like the open society have been involved we're trying to work with the US embassy right now just any kind of bigger funding applications that are happening we kind of jump onto a lot of people send me stuff every day around maybe you could tie in with this kind of thing so it's a constant battle and no one's kind of well off from it but it's it's it's it's starting to happen a little easier I think the more we built up a kind of reputation yeah and a community that recognizes the value of the work I do want to note that we have crossed the 45 minute threshold at which the official recording of the session concludes but of course we will continue we have about another half hour in this part of the session and then we have the water cooler chat afterwards um jehan let's say it's like Amy


Tom here from Orange Systems and we're going to talk about Hunter's Slabs. I've reviewed this product several times before, but there's new features and I wanted to review it kind of what it looks like here in 2022 and talk about the host isolation, the managed AV and not their managed AV, the fact that it can manage Microsoft Antivirus for things are really cool feature. There are process insights and how an incident looks right now in 2022 because yes, I created an incident for part of this demo that I'm going to be doing. And I've got everything time indexed down below. So if you want to jump right to the technical part, no problem. Everything is nice and indexed. You can find what you're looking for. I want to start with though, who's this video for? And who should watch it? Well, anyone can watch it, but would it be interesting to you? Well, if you're an end user, sorry, this isn't a product really designed for end users to purchase and load on their computers. This is a product designed for companies like myself, the managed service provider space or external IT who want to deploy this a client. So it gives us a cool dashboard, which you're going to be able to see. And this is how we can see cybersecurity incidents with our clients or get the reports or incident reports that we need or do some of the fun features we're going to talk about. This is also for internal IT teams. If you are in charge of an organization, you work internally there and you're looking at a tool to deploy across your organization. Absolutely Huntress has many of those type of clients that just buy it for their individual organization. So it does what they have what we would call multi tenant support so we can have all of our clients and have nice separate dashboards to drill down to any one client. Or if you just want to buy it directly, that's ideal. It's just not for end users to purchase directly in case anyone's wondering, but I get that out of the way. Now, why do we use Huntress? I want to talk just a little bit about and it's because they have a lot of people involved. And what I mean by that is actual people understanding what these threats and what the threat landscape looks like. Huntress is essentially a tool that doesn't just throw the word AI and the buzzwords around. They actually go through look at the incidents and I say they as in human beings with fingers on keyboards, threat ops engineers that are working there that actually take the time to understand the threat, understand how the incident got there and are able to provide real time help real time understanding and then write up an incident report and we're going to show you how these remediation reports look. They were human intervened and this is important because false positives are absolutely a horrible problem in the industry overall with cybersecurity. It causes a lot of decision fatigue. If you end up chasing a lot of things that weren't really real and you go, ah, it's another red light on a dashboard at some point, you never want to get that way. You don't want to feel like, oh, this is probably not an incident.  And this is where Huntress adds that extra high fidelity information pieces that we need in order to make a decision. So if we have a false positive with our AV tool, because as I said, Huntress itself is not an AV tool. Huntress is a managed detection response tool. It can work in conjunction with AV. So your need when you're doing an investigation, multiple pieces of information, that first piece of information might be an incident that came and the second piece might be Huntress going, that's a false positive because there's nothing in there. Huntress doesn't trigger alert. This gives us the insight as in my team, the insight we need to determine whether or not something's a real incident when we go to investigate it or just an update from some product that decided to get flagged by the AV vendor because reasons. This is one of those very helpful things and one of the reasons we continue to use Huntress as part of the cybersecurity stack that we offer our clients. All right. Now, last thing I want to mention to Huntress and I'll leave links to all this. There's a couple of blog posts that kind of talk about a little bit more in depth about how they participate in the community. And this has been, well, how I actually found Huntress to begin with. And one of the reasons I really like staying with them as a company is their involvement with bug bounty programs donating to the Dutch Vulnerability Institute, participating in these tradecraft Tuesdays, giving out a lot of information. And of course, when there's been large incidents, like the Cassay incident of 2021, well, they were there publicly disclosing everything they knew about it because many Cassay customers were also Huntress customers. So they offered a lot of insight very publicly to help anyone that was in this really bad situation with one of the largest massive ransomware attacks that we had seen. This is one of those things where Huntress doesn't just say, we're going to be the security for the 99% or raise the bar for security. They don't mean for themselves or for customers. They mean for the community. Their community involvement is huge. I have participated myself with their community programs like their tradecraft Tuesday and just online events they've had, their hacking events that are online where they just give out a lot of education stuff. And this is something that's near and dear to me because, well, I make YouTube videos and talk a lot about how to secure things, how to set things up. And this is just me giving back to the community myself and seeing other larger companies than myself doing it. Why not join and participate with them? That's one of the things that I just really enjoy and why I have such an alignment with them as a company. Now that being said, this was not paid for or endorsed by Huntress. I'm a customer of theirs. I pay to use their product just in case there was anything unclear about that or my relationship with them. All right, now it's time to dive into the technical aspects of this. Now before we get to the dashboard, I wanted to start at how to install Huntress and what it's supported on really straightforward from an install standpoint, download the Huntress agent installer, run the installer account key organization key, and then you can add tags like demo system like I did here. It does have a silent install option. But obviously the most ideal way if you're a manager's writer such as ourselves and using some of the RMM tooling, they do support integration into a lot of different systems from Atera continuum, connectwise, Datto, Kaseya, Microsoft Intune. And so yes, you can even integrate this within the installer of Intune, Ninja RMM, SolarWinds, Syncro and so on. Of course, you can just do it via PowerShell with Active Directory integration of note supported operating system requirements, Windows Pro Education Enterprise, Windows Home, Windows Server. The managed AV is not available unless you're using Windows Pro. And ideally you should be using this if you're dealing with businesses. This is mostly what you're going to encounter. But it's just something of note that if you're trying to deploy this from a management standpoint, that if you do have some Windows Home systems, the managed AV is not available. But the other functions such as external recon, ransomware canaries and the footholds is available. Host isolation also is being pushed via policies that are not available in the home version. So this little clarification there for those of you wondering. Now we're going to start here in a demo system that I have set up on the dashboard. This is my organization Lawrence Systems. These are some internal machines that we have because well, we always like testing and making sure we understand how these products work. This is some of the internal tests we were doing specifically in how we get some reactions of playing with this. If I go up to the top, I would be able to switch to the dashboard. It shows all of my clients, but I'm not going to do that. Can't really reveal all the client names in there. But yes, it does offer multi-tenancy where we can manage every client individually. And I mentioned a few times like how it groups things and organizations because it actually has a few features that are per organization to give you some insights into the different binaries that are running on there. Now to make this a leisure read, I'm going to zoom in here. So some things may look a little funny, but I want to make sure people can see the things around the screen here. We clicked on my test win system. And you can see the internal IP address of 192.168.13 and then the external IP address, which if you look this up, you'll find it belongs to a VPN provider, privacy VPN, and that is the external IP they see. This is how the external recon works. It'll look to see what ports are open and does have that as something it monitors so we can let you know the different external IPs that these devices beacon from and give you any external recon information it may have about there. It's actually a really nice feature they added. And I think it's just cool add-on because it's not too difficult on their side to do. They just go ahead and list out the IPs that they see things coming from and what ports might be open on there. And well, that's can be insightful sometimes, especially if you're not expecting any ports to be open. Now, last update request last seen what version it's on and the system auto updates the version. So that just kind of rolls out. Nothing you have to do, but at least you'll be able to see what agent is running on there. The architecture last survey it did and the isolate host button. We'll do a demo of that a little bit later and talk about what that is. Now we can look at the auto runs and these are all the things set to auto run in here. None of them are flagged as malicious or suspicious. And here's all the ones being monitored. And you can see things like, you know, Google Update Task Manager. And let's go ahead and click on the details of that. First seen five months ago monitored and what these classifications are is internal classifications that the Thread Out teams does to understand what this is, what this version is. Obviously Google Updater exceeds five months ago, but it's one that particular binary was updated and their signature for it because, well, that eventually gets back end updated from Google and on these systems. So you can scroll through, look at the different name, the task, what it's doing. Drill deeper down into the binary itself. And this is where that grouping of organizations seen on these agents, it specifically means seen on these agents within this organization. So here's a couple other ones that are in here. We have our network pun computer and Jeremy test wins and smiles. This same Google Updater was seen on each of these. Now this is very helpful when you have clients with line of business applications where you may see it deployed and know which machines it's on. This is actually kind of interesting insight when you're doing on a pert organization level like that. It also gives you the hash of the files, a couple of different methodologies, so you can understand and dive deeper into understanding these binaries. Just some nice things. Also virus total results. This is another feature they've added in there. So you can just click this. And also dive deep into virus total and go, all right, what is this thing? Is it a common popular item? Obviously it is. It's the Google Updater. So this is a lot of easy, simple content that when you're looking around and trying to investigate what's on a system or trying to figure out some things, not what you want to be on the system. These are just really simple things that Huntress has built in there to make it easy to investigate. Now for any of these, you do have the ability to search so you can filter down quickly to different things. You actually switched to all put in the Google in here. There's a different functions that Google has in there and date added category details just like before. Now Process Insights is a new feature that they have on here. We're going to show you the other system where I did an incident to get some detection and get some response on there. And then we can look at the processes here. Process Insights giving you insight into how a process behaves. It's an interesting feature. And what this does is gives you better insight into what the process is trying to do. A little similar to a behavior analytics, but it's digging into the commands that's being run. So you may see something that was spawned by CMD EXE or one of the other things like SVC host. But then what is it trying to do? And this is often an evasion method or sometimes in there's a good write up that Huntress has a leave link down below for the VMware Horizon incident, which they did a lot of good analytics and posted on this. It offered some insight of how their process analytics was able to see the different processes being spawned on VMware Horizon servers and understand what new attack factor was being deployed. And this is often what happens when there's a large scale attack. It hasn't been seen before because it's a very new attack factor and it was kind of related to how VMware had implemented a log 4j. And because someone was able to pivot and get into VMware servers with it through that, being able to see that and have the process insight to then start making decisions based on that to see it was a real threat is why they added this feature. This is a relatively new feature to Huntress, but I think it's really interesting and I actually was able to trigger some stuff on the process insights playing around with it. And that's the demo part we're going to get to shortly here. Now back over to here, we have binaries below and this is just listing all the binaries it finds on the system. And yes, there is just pages and pages of this so we can look at the different binaries. And once again, all these pivot back and forth between each other, a lot of these are just different perspectives on some of the same data, whether you look at it from an auto run, which ones are running, which ones are just existing on the system. But these are all the analytics things that this tool has. Now, the antivirus is really cool. Now, I've forgotten and left a couple of things on here. So this to you see next to it is the number of antivirus detections in the last 48 hours, because I didn't have the managed AVN now that I do, I had something I left in the downloads folder that I was going to deploy on here. And it did delete it. Now for all the problems, so to speak, in the past with Microsoft Defender of it not being the best AV system, they've actually revamped it a lot and it does a really good job and it detects quite a few things. But it does not lend itself to being easy to use. And that's where this managed AV function comes in. You currently can see that the antivirus policy status page we're on general everything's green across here exclusions and each piece is compliant. What that means is and we'll start over here at configure, you can go to inherit settings as in whatever settings you already have for Microsoft AV, you can audit the settings against all these different options right here that we're going to show, or you can say enforce and in the context of this, this is a independent system that doesn't have anything else telling it to manage Microsoft Windows Defender. So there's not any tooling setup to manage it, it's just kind of hanging out on the computer on its own. It's a Windows 10 Pro. So we're going to go ahead and set it to enforce and let Huntress do the management up there. Now when we go to the settings, the consent to visible or hidden suppressed notifications, you have an option to add exclusions if you want. When you want the scans to occur, and when you want the signatures now, we're going to change the signatures currently to four hours and hit save. And now we see we have a policy status of signatures are not compliant. So we have a one next to it. And what it's telling you is these interval policy setting is not four hours current host setting is six hours. And because we have it in enforce mode, it will push that setting out and over time it will go ahead and update the system. Then the system will do a survey, it will understand it and it'll update this. And now it'll be back in sync. This is how you can change settings. I really like that they added this because it just makes things a lot easier to manage with the Microsoft AV. And this is just something included within Huntress now. The last thing I'll mention this menu is the monitored files. They have set up ransomware canaries essentially inside of each system that you deploy Huntress on unless you turn the feature off. I actually like this on. It's nice because it's one more indicator that if something triggers if something messes with these files and this is something obscured from the user so it shouldn't see it but ransomware tools will just you know go around running around encrypting things they find on here. So if something touches these files that the user shouldn't be touching that once again is one more trigger point that can notify that there's something going around alert the threat ops team and then the investigation process starts. Alright, we're going to switch over to this agent here called Huntress test. And it's the same dashboard Windows 10 Pro it's a different computer because this one I actually took the time to go ahead and start deploying some things on. Nothing's actually an auto run. So nothing will assist suspicious here. But under process insights there's plenty of suspicious stuff going on. And you can see I'd run some Mimi cats on here. I did a registry dump. And this is one of those behavioral things that the process insights can really pick up on because you're seeing that this was just spawned by PowerShell. And then a series of PowerShell commands were run in order to pull this data down. And this is where it's that behavior again that we're looking at to say, All right, this isn't just a process or something on the system. Now, unfortunately, I also, and this is my fault, I forgot to turn off the first time I ran it. So there's a bunch of things in here, specifically, all the different tools by atomic red team that I had loaded. I had turned off Microsoft Windows Defender to hopefully evade this. And then I forgot that I left the policy on.  So Defender actually does, you know, find these. I thought it was weird that it called some home to say potentially unwanted, but then other ones which are like auto KMS and a few other things on here were all part of this atomic red team loader that I'd set up. It picked up all those children back door and some exploit from shell codes. This is all different things that got flagged. Now, of course, that means hunters did see this and did create an incident report on here. So now we can look at the incident reports. And because I was running a series of tools, there's a series of incident reports on there. So it says what service did it? You can see how it's highlighted here. And we can go click on it and read through the incident report. Now this is really important. This was actually looked at by someone at Huntress. This wasn't just an automated. We sent a report over to you. They realized then they seen this like this is tools on there. Even though the systems labeled Hunter's tests, obviously, there's people that reviewed all this. And once it went up and someone seen a bunch of alerts coming off one system, there's definitely a lot of people that got involved that reviewed this looked at it made sure what need to be done remaining footholds. And this is that managed detection response. This is the they detected something. So all the different things I had done such as turning off the AV, all those things were noted put in here. And so please review this incident report and you go down and even tells you this is one of the things I really like about these instance reports. More information on the technique of what was being done is actually included in report. So they very quickly assemble this information when they see the attack. So you have a lot of insight into what happened even if you're the one causing it. And I think this is just great that each one of these is a link that we can dive into and we have had incidents, you know, just the nature of running this product for years where clients have got something on their computers, something's happened, or especially when you're onboarding a new client. Sometimes you discover things that the client didn't even know they had. And these are just times when we've had to go through the reports. They are very, very helpful and very good at helping us understand exactly what's going on. Now all this is sent as an email as well can be integrated into different alert systems that you have and integrate into the tooling that you have as well to help manage the alerts internally. So there's different processes in each side that I'm just focusing on the Hunter's dashboard. So you can see how the alerts are in here. But yes, they can be sent to you via email and external methods of communicating this. Now they also because they can do the antivirus detection. Here's a alert that's specifically for the antivirus detection. And what this does is have the and it depends on the type of alert. But if it's possible to fix something via the alert, you have the remediation plan. And this is nice, especially when you have something just minor on the system that's not like it's a incident of ransomware or something severe, it's a minor incident. So they have these options to remediate this specific one because they see these different tools right here to like, all right, do you want to remediate these? They were found and you can say approve, and then it will go through remediation is approved and you're telling the tool to automatically go in and delete those. Like I said, this is a backup, so to speak, the manager detection response that they do is in addition to your other tools on there, but they still offer this remediation. And it's one of the reasons we really like the way Huntress looks at things on there. And, you know, like this is just for getting rid of this Windows activation bypass KMS and the different files that found. So yes, that was part of this download. We ran the remediation. Now it'll be deleted. We can, you know, close out that incident on there. So now we're going to go back over to our Huntress test machine right here. And the IP address is 192-168-40.145 internally. It has a gateway of 192-168-40.1. Now, this is really great. This is the host isolation with the goal being to prevent lateral movement. Now if something gets on that system in this particular system, the next concern is what else will this threat actor do if they're on here? Well, they move laterally. Was this a machine that had compromised credentials on it that would allow them to elevate their privilege to somewhere else or maybe it already has privileges and things are just going to go really bad really quick because they're going to pivot to somewhere else on the network or reach out to a server where they're going to download more tools. So once you see something compromised on there, this allows you to jump in the action in terms of isolating the host, locking it down, disconnecting it from the internet. Now, this is something that Huntress can do in certain situations. There is a chance they may contact you if you can't contact you, but they know this is going to go bad really quickly. It may be worth them to take the system offline. The good news is you can take it on and offline from here. Once you take it offline, it only communicates with the Huntress servers and goes into a full isolation mode and not just isolated from the internet, but isolated from the local network. What we're going to do to set this demo up is I open up Google News. So I've got a lot of connections in the background going. I have the test and we're just doing a PowerShell test connection to go ahead and give me an idea of the ping times on this. So here we are ping in the local gateway 40.1 and it's responding. I left the timestamps on there so we can go through exactly how quickly this isolates the host. So we're going to go over here to the Management Council. Actually, first we'll show in PF Sense here. Here's all the different connections that I have established. It's behind this particular PF Sense. You can see that zoom in a little bit. You can see that same host IP right here. You go here. Isolate Host and we're going to tell them why we're isolating it. It's a YouTube demo. I see and also make this host reachable from partner network administration. Only traffic from hunters.io will be allowed in, out, during containment. Are you sure you want to isolate this host off the network? Isolate Host. Jump over here as quick as we can and we see 228 is when we isolated the host. Let's see how many seconds it takes before that host isolation kicks in. And here we go. It took probably 15, 20 seconds it looked like. So it's at 229 it stopped. It was like 228 in a few seconds when we started and now it's failing. Now let's go ahead and take it out of host isolation. It's still pending because it's host isolation has been scheduled by Tom Lawrence at 28 and 35 seconds. So yes, less than 30 seconds later this host was isolated isolation containment message YouTube demo. So we know why we did it. Now it's going to take a second it's contacting the host the host contacts here. This page will get refreshed and updated. And then from there we can take it back out of isolation. It's still in pending mode and now it's isolated. Now we can go back and release the host. So the host is still timing out connections right here. And we're going to go ahead and release, release the host. All right. Your host release has been scheduled at 1829 and that only took a few seconds. So that was pretty much immediate there for unisolating hosts. This is a great feature to lock it down. And it doesn't just lock it down except for the internet. It can't even paint the gateway. Other devices can't talk to this. It is isolated with a minimal exception of being able to still communicate with the Huntress Management dashboard. This is really good in case you go into a panic and do it either accidentally or because you're worried about something and gives you some time to investigate. So that host just kind of goes dark, but you can still bring it back up while you investigate. I think this is a really cool feature. And I love how well it works. I've been playing around with it and pulling it up from PF Sense and seeing all the connections. And it will actually some of these connections are now stale stated. But if you leave it in there while you watch just all the connections go stale, it doesn't allow any of the states to stay active. So one of the tests I want to do from a network engineering standpoint and really look at it was it has all these connections. I was wondering if any like active TCP states would stay or you had to do anything else. Nope, it kills all active states. They all go into basically expired mode and all has to be reestablished, which actually does mean when you first do it and it should work now, but it takes sometimes a second before the I've had the page pause a little bit because it says some stale connections when you go back and forth. But it does actively kill all sessions, TCP, UDP related and isolate this exactly as expected, which this is really important, especially if you know where you are in that panic mode of something's attacking this computer or someone has gotten access to the system. Let me just lock it down really quick. So those are my thoughts on Huntress here in March of 2022 it's a product we've been using for years and plan to continue on using. That being said, even if you're not interested in this product, if you are interested in cybersecurity, highly recommend joining their tradecraft Tuesdays, join those events, look at the different things that Huntress puts on, read through the reports they have on their blog post. No, no membership required, you can just go through and read them. Their insights into what's going on in these small business and MSP market space is really interesting. Their write ups are very technical to understand exactly how threat actors are doing what they do. So just from a cybersecurity learning standpoint, I love that they publish all this very freely because there's plenty of independent researchers doing things, but them as a company, they do a lot of great work publishing it out there and encouraging others to participate in this. Because ultimately, it's not that any of these companies should have any of this data secret, the better we share all this intelligence about how threat actors are exploiting things is how we get better at defending them. So even if you're not a Huntress customer, as I said, I think it's just pretty cool to go through and read through all the technical reports they have. Because as I said, that's even how I met them was like, wow, these people really have some good insight into what's going on and are willing to publish all of it and talk about it, which, you know, that really piques my interest here. And hopefully it piques a lot of your interest as well, it's definitely a fun topic. All right, leave comments down below or have a more in depth discussion over on my forums. Thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you like to hire a short project, head over to laurancesystems.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways. There's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts and offers, check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. And finally our forums. Forums.LauranceSystems.com is where you can have a more in depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel. 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We have learned a lot. I mean to say that starting from how to keep ourselves safe from the virus getting spread, and then how to behave in a room with maintaining a social distancing, all these things we have learned. The question remains that if similar to that comes again in different forms, are we really ready to tackle this? Our health care infrastructure is ready to tackle this or not. This is one question. And the second question is that is it possible to detect it beforehand? So being a part of artificial intelligence group at IIT, Bobanesha, what I feel that at least we can create systems that will be able to predict that we are moving towards a scenario where a similar situation may arise. OK.