Blue Ridge Technology

Alert: A clever new type of ransomware attack Another week, another brand-new form of cyberattack. It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it? As a business leader, it’s easy veer in one of two directions. Either you live in constant fear or you grow numb and complacent to the very real threats. The best approach lies somewhere in the middle, where you recognize the threats for what they are and take appropriate steps to combat them. This week, we’re shedding light on a new threat vector, one that affects any business with a website that has a contact form. The New Threat Explained This new threat isn’t all that complicated, and that’s part of what makes it so effective. Here’s how it works. A threat actor visits your website normally, just like any other visitor would. They look for a contact form and fill it out, posing as a real lead or prospect. So far, if they’ve built an effective attack, they haven’t done anything out of the ordinary or suspicious. They just look like any other cus...

When something’s wrong, you want a responsive IT helpdesk. It’s an all-too-familiar scene: in an office complex somewhere near you, an employee is fighting with a computer. Something that has always worked, something that’s supposed to work, something the employee needs to do their job— you guessed it, it’s not working. At this hypothetical company, there’s a structure in place to solve problems like this: the IT helpdesk. In theory, the employee should just call the helpdesk to get the problem solved. But the employee doesn’t call the helpdesk right away. They spend 30 minutes, an hour, maybe two trying to solve the problem themselves. They bother a tech-savvy coworker or loop in their manager. Two or three people — none of whom is trained for it — now sit around the computer, poking through menus and Googling the symptoms. This not-so-hypothetical scenario plays out countless times every day, wasting too many resources and destroying worker focus and productivity. If you’ve lived it,...

How to protect your webcam from spies A few years ago, news rumbled through the tech press that Mark Zuckerberg, leader of Facebook (now Meta), was doing something unusual with his MacBook. It showed up first on Twitter , and was quickly picked up by numerous outlets, eventually reaching general news markets like The New York Times and The Guardian . So, what’s the weird thing Zuck was doing? Taping over the webcam on his MacBook Pro (and the microphone, too). The reason is straightforward enough: someone as powerful as Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be caught on camera or on audio discussing trade secrets, future products, or even his personal life. And he knew then that there was at least a possibility that his webcam and microphone could be weaponized against him without his knowledge. Paranoia or Something More? So what was going on here? Did Zuckerberg know something the rest of us didn’t? Maybe. But if so, he’s never come out with it. In all likelihood, Zuckerberg didn’t know of any...

A longer lasting battery with Efficiency mode Does your workforce rely on laptops or tablets running Windows? If so, battery life can be a persistent concern. Everything’s fine when your team members are working at their primary desk and connected to power, but short battery life can create headaches and even lost work in other situations. And what about resource efficiency? Do your team’s laptops and Windows tablets seem to struggle under the weight of everything you need them to do? Or do they feel surprisingly sluggish compared to just a few years ago? Sometimes the answer to problems like these is that you need to upgrade older devices. Batteries don’t last forever, and older machines lack the power of newer ones. But what if you could get more out of your current devices—without needing to replace them just yet? That’s what the latest upcoming feature in Windows 11 promises to do. Here’s everything you need to know about a Efficiency Mode, a feature likely coming to Windows 11 in ...

Multi-Factor, A New Way of Life. Microsoft recently announced some security statistics from 2021, and they’re more than a little eyebrow-raising. The headline statistic? Microsoft blocked more than 35.7 billion malicious emails from reaching the inboxes of its Microsoft 365 customers. Yes, that’s billion — with a b . That’s nearly 100 million emails a day, or more than 4 million per hour, or almost 68,000 every minute of every day in 2021. As bad as malicious emails are, imagine how much worse they’d be without the Herculean efforts of cloud providers like Microsoft and others. We’ll cover other news from Microsoft’s latest security announcement today, plus talk about what steps you should take to make sure your company remains protected. What Were These Malicious Emails? “Malicious emails” is a broad term that can include a wide range of attacks. But most of the 35.7 billion were plain old phishing emails. That’s both good and bad news, depending on how you look at it. It’s good news ...

Updates Can Be a Pain, but not as Painful as a Breach! Over the years, Microsoft has developed quite a reputation surrounding its Windows updates. It seems like every week there’s something new popping up and saying “Update me now, please!” When it’s not Windows itself or other core Microsoft 365 apps, it’s some other software tool you rely on to get work done. If your business isn’t using endpoint management (more on that later), then it’s up to every single PC user in your organization to make sure their machine is up to date. And, unfortunately, Microsoft makes it easy enough for them to cheat, thanks to that “later” button that’s always popping up. (Admit it; you’ve probably used it, too. So have we, and we do this for a living!) Thankfully in recent years and releases, Microsoft has slowed the pace of its security updates and made many of them happen behind the scenes, without any user action needed. But you still could be in danger from un-updated devices — even if everyone on yo...

Time for a Work from Home Review? As we finally get to a place where the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be winding down (or at least toward endemic status), many businesses are reassessing their emergency work-from-home plans. If you opened up to remote and/or hybrid work for the first time due to the pandemic, your teams might be wondering what’s next. Maybe you’re wondering that yourself! Do your teams hate working from home, or do they love it? Are they eager to come back to the office, or will they quit if you require it? We’ll provide some key answers here, plus top strategies for supporting your at-home or hybrid workers long-term. Desire for Remote and Hybrid Work Has Never Been Stronger So, what do your employees want? Polling your employees can offer insights, of course. But some might be reticent to tell you how they really feel. And there’s already some good research out there that can give you a hint about what they’re thinking. According to a wide-ranging FlexJobs survey co...

Business Titans Connect Microsoft recently announced yet another big update coming soon to Microsoft Teams, its popular collaboration app that’s part of every Microsoft 365 and Office 365 package. This one seems a little less obvious at first — you might even wonder what the point behind it is. The new, groundbreaking integration? LinkedIn . Yes, believe it or not, Microsoft has owned the business-oriented social network since 2016. Up until now, LinkedIn has stayed pretty much independent from other Microsoft products (at least as far as end users can see). But starting soon, Microsoft is bringing some deeper integrations between the social network and at least one of its popular office apps. Here’s everything you need to know about the coming update. The Big Change: See Colleagues’ LinkedIn Profiles in Some Teams Chats So what’s the gist of the new update? Starting soon, Teams will gain the ability to pull in content from team members’ LinkedIn profiles. You’ll be able to surface tha...