Harness Group Blog

Watch Out for Ads as You Browse the Internet

As you navigate the web, it’s crucial to stay vigilant about the ads you encounter. Recent reports highlight that Google searches have become a significant target for malvertising hackers. These malicious ads can lead to harmful websites or download malware onto your device or get you to give them sensitive data. Always ensure your browser and security software are up-to-date, and be cautious about clicking on ads, especially those that seem too good to be true.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/google-searches-big-target-for-malvertising-hackers.html

Mastering VLOOKUP in Excel

I’m not an Excel guru, but I would consider myself a light power user. VLOOKUP is one of my favorite and most used functions. Excel’s VLOOKUP function is a powerful tool for anyone dealing with large datasets. If you’re looking to enhance your Excel skills, check out this informative video tutorial on VLOOKUP here. The video covers everything from the basics to advanced tips, making it easier to find and analyze data efficiently.

https://youtu.be/xIynD1gFOLo?si=5DRXtRKua-AFltrU

The Importance of Subject Matter Experts for Your Major Line of Business Applications

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having subject matter experts (SMEs) for your major line of business applications is more critical than ever. SMEs bring specialized knowledge and experience that can help streamline processes, improve decision-making, and ensure that your applications are used to their fullest potential. Investing in SMEs can lead to better performance, reduced errors, and a more robust business strategy overall.

Our primary line of business applications here at Harness Group are ConnectWise and Office 356 admin center among others. We require regular general and specialized training so that we can stay up to date on the use of the software and gain efficiencies as new features are rolled out. Every staff member has a baseline understanding of our platforms, but some of us go further so that we can be our own internal support for the tool.

Each of our clients has their own line of business applications where it would be of major benefit to invest in an SME(s) to help use your software to its fullest potential day to day. We help as best we can with software-related troubleshooting among the hundreds of pieces of software that our clients use daily, but someone who is in the software day in and day out with this specialized training is going to be a massive asset in the nuances of their company’s software setup, configuration, inner workings and functions.

NotebookLM - AI is starting to show promise for us common folks

NotebookLM is an experimental AI-powered research and writing assistant developed by Google. It allows users to upload their documents and then leverages the power of language models to provide insights, summaries, and explanations based on those sources. This tool is designed to help users synthesize information more efficiently by generating summaries, answering detailed questions, and converting complex material into easy-to-understand formats. NotebookLM aims to be a virtual research assistant, making it easier to connect ideas and gain deeper understanding from the documents you upload. One of its coolest features is that it has the ability to make an AI generated audio podcast with two AI hosts from documents that you upload! NotebookLM isn't something that we sell or support, but I wanted to share what we're seeing in the AI space as it progresses. Here are a couple of links to the NotebookLM site, and a Forbes article about the podcast feature:

https://notebooklm.google/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2024/10/04/how-to-create-an-ai-podcast-about-anything-in-seconds-with-notebooklm/

Welcome to the Third edition of our HG Newsletter. For any of you who don't know me, I'm

Seneca Allen, one of the partners here at Harness Group.

The IT landscape is constantly changing for the better and for the worse. New tools are

released to make our lives easier, us more efficient, save us time and money and

communicate better with each other. Bad actors are constantly looking for and inventing

new ways to trick us and play on the trust that we have for one another.

Here in this newsletter, I will bring to the forefront an item or two in each edition that

speaks to these topics. There's so much information constantly coming at us, that we here

at Harness Group want to do our best to highlight a few things for you to pay attention to

in bite size portions.

The title of this edition of the newsletter comes from a phrase that we hear often when

we're on site at a client's office. Our company's model is remote first support, so when

we're on site, we get lots of questions about nagging items but also about tips and tricks,

and asked for recommendations about tech related topics, and we want to address some of

that here in this newsletter.

If you like what we're doing and this content, please leave us a Google Review!

Outlook is not a good Task Manager

But it is good for lots of other things. Here is a video from Johnathan Edwards, one of my

favorite Microsoft 365 experts with 12 tips for better outlook productivity including a

reference to Microsoft's built in Task Manager tool, ToDo, which I've referenced in these

newsletters before and that I and my team use daily!

https://youtu.be/JVC9ZO9OvZU?si=_5uBmIUr5ts6Pe0I

It's time to lock down your Credit Report

2.9 billion people may have had their personal information when a background check

company doing business as National Public Data, owned by Jerico Pictures Inc., failed to

properly safeguard information it scraped. This was a major headline in the security world

last week, so if you're not aware, check out this article, and I would recommend locking

down your credit report any time that you're not actively looking to obtain new credit:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/15/billions-people-social-security-numbers-and-data-

stolen-allegedly.html

Article on HOW to lock your Credit Report:

https://www.theverge.com/24224789/data-breach-freeze-report-security-how-to

Helpful stuff in Office 365

Office 365 and other Windows apps have a LOT to offer. Unlike the urban legend about

humans only using 10% of our brains, most of us do only use a small percentage of what

we have access to in Office 365. I create this newsletter in a Microsoft product called Sway

that's a part of my Office 365 subscription. Here are a few other items that you might find

useful that you may already have access to:

https://www.howtogeek.com/microsoft-365-hacks-you-didnt-know-you-needed/

OneDrive Beginner / Refresher Video!

You Asked for it, and here it is! Another fantastic video by Jonathan Edwards at Integral IT in

the UK about OneDrive. He reviews most if not all of the basics and best practices that we

share in our initial setup and migrations to OneDrive for all of our clients, along with a few

new items that we haven't shared previously. EVERYONE using OneDrive  and/or SharePoint

who sometimes needs a refresher should review and save this video for future reference

and new employees that they come on board.

https://youtu.be/vjeTALC_7Qg?si=BtgpsVkOziDo6LP4

In an effort to streamline the process of getting these helpful tips to people as quickly as possible, I would like to ask all users who would like to continue receiving our helpful tips emails to please go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter. You can even have your friends and family sign up if you like. Everyone who signs up will then receive it directly whenever I send it out without anyone having to forward! Here is the link to do that on our site:

https://www.harness.group/news-a-events

I'll continue to send this way for a little while longer as I see the newsletter list grow. For now. Here is a link to the new and improved newsletter format, I hope it helps you all:

Spring is just around the corner and in the spirit of fresh starts for our first helpful tips email of 2024, I’d like to introduce those of you who aren’t familiar with it to the Harness Support portal.

It is the best way for you to create, track and manage your Harness support tickets. You can view closed tickets and their resolutions without having to search or sort through your emails.

Quite a few of you have already been set up in and use the portal. The portal will help us deliver faster service to you and even has a searchable knowledge base of past tickets and resolutions to potentially help you get to an answer faster. Here are some of the benefits of the portal:

• One place to see all of your support requests
• Real-time status on open tickets and projects
• Consolidated conversations around open tickets
• One place for company administrators to see ticket history and status for the entire company
• Searchable knowledge base for past tickets
• Eliminates duplicate tickets for the same issue

In the portal, you can see:

• Who’s assigned to your ticket
• The current status of your ticket
• Any communications about your ticket
• All your closed tickets
• Templates for creating new tickets if you’re not sure what to put in or what’s needed
• You will soon see projects and their parts and status as well

Here is a picture of the portal with me logged in:

You can see here on the Create Ticket screen that we have preset ticket types that walk you through what’s needed to complete your request. Using the preset ticket types will provide a faster resolution by eliminating some of the back and forth communications to collect the required information.  We’ll update and add to these presets over time to continually give our customers a better service experience.

Next time you need to open a support case with Harness Group, please consider using the portal. Your username is always the primary email address that we have on file for you. You can access it via:

• the Account Login link at the bottom of our website landing page (https://harness.group)
• by going directly to the portal at https://na.myconnectwise.net/harnessgroup/
• by clicking the “View Ticket” link at the bottom of any ticket email that you receive
• The HG logo communicator in the taskbar area of your main screen:

  

If you need a portal login account or need to reset your password, please contact our office at (678) 609-8150, Opt. 1 and one of our support team members will be glad to assist you.

• As your trusted IT partner, we are continually assessing and evaluating best practices to be implemented in your environment for security and digital well-being of your employees and business data. Currently, we are working too make sure that MFA (multi factor authentication) is turned on for every user and that every client is protected by our XDR security platform. We are now working to make sure that all external emails are tagged as such. When bad actors spoof an email address, they can fake the name, but they cannot fake whether it came from within your email system or from an external source. Because of this, over the next few weeks we’ll be adding the [External] tag in all of your environments to help you easily identify internal vs. external emails. We get a LOT of tickets asking, “is this legit,” and this can help each person answer that question much more quickly in many situations.
  
  
  
• This past week it was reported that a major security company was breached because an employee accessed their personal email account on a company computer and that personal account had been compromised. This is why it is of utmost importance to secure all of your accounts no matter what. It’s almost impossible in the modern world to keep our work and personal data completely separate. From personal email on company owned devices to company email on personal devices and then the hub of modern life, cell phones, personal account security cannot be overlooked.
  
  https://www.securityweek.com/okta-hack-blamed-on-employee-using-personal-google-account-on-company-laptop/
  
  
• We all know that Windows has lots of features and most of us only use about 10% of them regularly. In this short video, Microsoft Expert, Kevin Stratvert, shows us 4 great built in features that many of us can use to make our computers look a little nicer and potentially make us a little more efficient:
  
  https://youtube.com/shorts/LVOjE6VQwg0?si=PHXp2xOhUzC7H2DB

In our modern lives, work and personal often crossover and bleed into on another. This makes it of utmost importance to protect all of our accounts in every location. Bad actors will use AI and social engineering to build profiles of individuals and target them for compromise across any platform that they can. Just keeping your work email off of your phone is not enough to prevent this. I spoke to a user on site at a client office yesterday who was actively dealing with the fallout of their social security number being compromised and used. Here is an article from Forbes about best practices for protecting yourself and your family across your entire life, all accounts and attack targets:

7 Simple Ways To Shield Yourself From Cybersecurity Threats

2 extremely useful features in Windows 10 and 11 are the Snipping tool (instead of old and clunky print screen keyboard button) and Clipboard history. I've shared these tools with quite a few of you, but these are shortcuts that can help everyone who ever needs to grab things that are on their screen, and/or if you've ever copied something then gone to paste it and realized that you've copied over it! One of the best use cases for these two tools together is if you're creating a set of instructions to walk through a process that includes a lot of screens, you can quickly walk through the process, grabbing screen snips and marking them up with the built in markup tools. All of the items will stay on your clipboard for you to access and paste into your instruction document all at once instead of having to do them one at a time. These tools will absolutely make your life easier:

Windows Snipping Tool and Clipboard History

There is a new round of bad guy trickery going on. Bad Actors are using fake websites to request users to "update" their browsers. This is not real! When your browser needs to be updated, it will come from a notification in the browser itself, not on the screen from a website. Here is an article explaining this, and how to check if your browser is up to date if you ever encounter this request (section at the bottom of the article titled, 'How to Update Chrome Safely"). I also mentioned this in my tips from a few weeks about about Chrome and Edge browsers needing to be updated, so this is just a refresher:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2023/10/19/google-chrome-users-warned-dont-click-to-update-browser-on-websites/?sh=6bac5733558e

Two of my favorite Microsoft tools are 'To Do' and 'Sticky Notes'. Both of these tools allow you to take quick notes, and access them in multiple place
To do is fantastic app that allows to to track tasks directly from your email, calendar, other Microsoft apps and on the fly. You can set due dates and reminders, and even share tasks with others on your team and within your organization. My team and I use this constantly, and it keeps all of us on track without have to find a separate app or platform to manage tasks on. It's already built into outlook for everyone!

Here's a good video introduction from Kevin Stratvert to get you started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQuRomdiJ58

Lot's of folks already use sticky notes. I see them pinned on desktops all the time, but, did you know that if you sign into your sticky notes, then they sync to your email, One Note, and directly into the notes section of the Microsoft 365 app? This allows you to save, backup and access anywhere all those notes that you've been creating and looking at on your desktop for all these years!

Here is a good video as an introduction. It's from a year ago, so it doesn't mention the Microsoft 365 app, so there's a quick 2nd video explaining this app:

Sticky Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utDryRmD0-E

Microsoft 365 App: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbLMS2Fhcsk

• We've seen a lot of spoofed emails in the last few months and gotten a lot of tickets for us to check them out. These are easily recognizable because the email address never comes from who it claims. As a reminder, when determining whether an email is legitimate or not, always check the actual email address and not just the name associated with it. Any name can be associated with an email address, but no 2 users on earth can have the exact same email address. Here is an example that we received this morning. If you check, the email address will almost never match the name that you see (in this case, Harness | System Notification). THIS IS A PHISHING EMAIL FOR CREDENTIAL HARVESTING. YOU WILL NEVER RECEIVE AN EMAIL FROM US OR MICROSOFT STATING THAT YOUR PASSWORD WILL EXPIRE AND TO CLICK IN ORDER TO KEEP IT:
  
  
  Here you can see that the name does not match the email address; has been compromised and bad actors are using her email address to send out phishing emails from a legitimate address, hoping that the recipient won't pay attention to the email address and only the name:
  
  
  
• We receive a lot of support requests about how to use some of the features in Microsoft OneDrive, and Kevin Stratvert, a former Microsoft employee, makes great videos about many of the helpful features in all of their software applications. Click the link below to watch a video from Kevin Statvert that contains some helpful OneDrive tips; the video is broken up in to sections, so you can watch the entire thing, or go to the video notes and jump to the sections that interest you the most:
  
  https://youtu.be/prA75mu3arc?si=EqxN9Yg-_XBHSpMX

• Last week there was a security vulnerability found in several programs including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox. Please make sure that these browsers are updated on your computer by going to about in your browser and it will let you know if you're up to date, or if there is an update available:
  
  Here's an article about the vulnerability if you'd care to read further:
  
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-fixes-fifth-actively-exploited-chrome-zero-day-of-2023/
  
  
• We receive a lot of support requests about how to use some of the features in Microsoft Outlook, and Kevin Stratvert, a former Microsoft employee, makes great videos about many of the helpful features in all of their software applications. Click the link below to watch a video from Kevin Statvert that contains some helpful Email management tips; the video is broken up in to sections, so you can watch the entire thing, or go to the video notes and jump to the sections that interest you the most:
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edABo0VnHK8

Harness Group is proud to announce the launch of our new website at http://www.harness.group/. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our services for prospective clients.

How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.

The password isn’t nearly as secure as it used to be. Hackers have begun to take advantage of extremely powerful solutions designed to brute force their way into accounts by using software to rapidly guessing thousands of passwords per second, making it extraordinarily difficult to prepare yourself for them.

What’s the best way to guarantee that passwords aren’t going to be the downfall of your company? A great start is by taking a close look at password best practices and two-factor authentication.

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.

The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.

There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.