Harness Group Blog

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:

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