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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Understanding How Your Business Benefits from Managed Services

Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) receive a lot of calls each day from slick sales people peddling the next technology trend that’s going to save them money and revolutionize how they do business. They’re all too quick to caution that if you don’t listen to them, you’ll fall behind the times, and eventually be swimming in a sea of debt and out of business.

No doubt you’ve heard, or you’ve at least read about, the benefits of managed services. Managed services refer to clearly defined outsourced IT services delivered to you at predictable costs. You know the exact IT services you’ll be getting and what you’ll pay for them. There is no surprise sky-high bill for services rendered. So are solicitation calls that pertain to managed services worth listening to? We think so. Then again, we’re in the managed services industry. There may be a bit of a bias here.

How Managed Service Providers Work

Managed service providers (MSPs) use remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to keep an eye on their performance and overall health of the IT infrastructure that powers your business operations.

Your MSP should have a 24/7 monitoring system that acts as your mission control center. If the monitoring alerts them to any issue with your servers, devices, hardware or software, they respond quickly to resolve the issue.

Additionally, the monitoring performs regular systems maintenance such as

Additionally, your MSP should give you access to a Help Desk that services your customers and employees – speaking to and working with them directly as if they’re part of your staff.

This proactive maintenance, stabilization of your IT environment, and rapid as- needed remediation helps SMBs control technology costs and better serve the end-users who rely on their technology.

Is Managed Services Better than Other Ways to Manage IT

We find that far too many companies have no real perspective about how much IT management costs them. Let’s review some of the alternatives to managed services.

Hiring In-House IT Support

Typically, a firm with anywhere from 20-60 employees may feel that one person can manage their technology. Understand that this one full-time employee can demand a significant salary since they’ll have to be proficient with desktop, server and network support, and interact with both end-users in the Help Desk role and management. They will likely be overworked and vulnerable to error or oversights that may prove to be costly. And what happens if they’re out sick or on vacation?

The Break/Fix Mentality

The majority of smaller companies take this route because they feel as if they’re too small for a more sophisticated 24/7 approach to IT management. They also feel pressure to direct all resources on the product or service, not behind-the- scenes operations. They decide to use on-call IT techs when broken technology has already disrupted business. The on-call team’s response time and overall lack of familiarity with your systems extends downtime and proves to be a much more expensive resolution to IT management. It’s reactive, not proactive, and it’s a costly mistake too often made.

This is why many SMBs today feel that managed services are the most cost- effective way to support their IT infrastructure and the best way to get more bang for their buck.

 

Click HERE and contact us today to find out how YOUR business can benefit from Managed Services!

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Microsoft Teams Gets Optimizations To Use Less Resources

Do you use Microsoft Teams and do you have an older PC that struggles with Teams video meetings?  If so there’s good news.  Microsoft has recently upgraded Teams and halved the power used by Teams video meetings to make life easier on people with older hardware.

Of course, even if you’ve got newer hardware this is still very good news because odds are excellent that the video meeting that you’re participating in isn’t the only thing you’re doing on your PC. Anything that Microsoft can do to make Teams less resource intensive means you’ll have more resources for other uses.

Robert Aichner is a program manager at Microsoft Research.

Aichner had this to say about the recent improvements:

“We’re committed to ensuring great calling and meeting experiences for users on low-end hardware as well as those on high-end workstations and high-resolution monitors.

One of the factors we’ve addressed is the difference in power requirements for different customer profiles by ensuring Teams meetings are as energy-efficient as possible, regardless of setup.”

Video meetings rely on three power-intensive processes:  Capture, encoding and rendering.

Again, per Aichner:

“Isolating and optimizing each of these processes enabled us to reduce power consumption up to 50% for energy-intensive scenarios such as having over 10 users in a meeting when everyone has their video turned on.

A simple 3×3 video grid once required nine distinct rendering operations. By combining the streams and composing them into a single video, we have been able to consolidate operations in video rendering and significantly reduce the power requirements for each device used.”

The company made major improvements by redesigning how Teams handles grid videos with multiple participants.

Microsoft has stiff competition in the arena where Teams is operating, and there are several viable alternatives, which is why Microsoft is spending so much time and applying significant resources to the task of continually improving Teams.

So far it is working.  Microsoft has an impressive product indeed, in teams and these recent changes are excellent.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Medusa Android Banking Trojan Steals Sensitive User Information

There are two new forms of malware spreading rapidly among people with Android devices according to researchers at ThreatFabric. This latest campaign involves the FluBot malware (also known as Cabassous) and the Android banking trojan called Medusa.  What’s disturbing about this most recent spate of attacks is that both forms of malware share the same basic infection tactics and delivery infrastructure.

FluBot is one of the most notorious strains of Android malware and can steal passwords, banking details, and other sensitive information from infected devices. It also gains access to the user’s list of contacts and uses SMS messages to spread to other devices.

FluBot’s success has encouraged imitators. Although Medusa was not created by the same group that authored FluBot, Medusa’s authors are following in FluBot’s footsteps.

In the case of Medusa it began life as a keylogger. It has been upgraded and can now take screenshots and collect data about how the device is used.  Medusa’s authors have even gone so far as to deliver their malicious payload by using poisoned apps bearing the exact same names that FluBot’s controllers use.

The researchers at ThreatFabric had this to say about the matter:

“Despite the fact that Medusa is not extremely widespread at the moment, we do see an increase in volume of campaigns and a sufficiently greater number of different campaigns.

Powered with multiple remote access features, Medusa poses a critical threat to financial organisations in targeted regions.”

The single best thing users can do to minimize the risk of infection by either of these forms of malware is to install apps from the Google Play store or other authorized and trusted vendors only.  Never install an app via a direct link or from some other website that offers it.  It just isn’t worth the risk.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Malware Disguised As Windows 11 Upgrade Targets Windows 10 Users

According to researchers at HP, there’s a new threat to worry about.  Hackers have recently begun disguising malware as Windows 11 upgrades and are using them to target Windows 10 users who are anxious to move to Microsoft’s latest OS. This new campaign begins like many others with an email informing the recipient that if they click the link provided in the email, they’ll be taken to Microsoft’s website where they can get a free copy of Windows 11.

Victims who click the link will be taken to a site that is a very good and convincing replica of the legitimate Microsoft website.  Only a careful inspection of the URL will reveal that something is amiss and most users don’t pay much attention to URLs so this is quite likely to go unnoticed.

Once on the site, the victim will be prompted to download the file that promises to be Windows 11.  It is nearly 800 MB in size so at that point it still seems legitimate.

Unfortunately, if the victim runs the downloaded file they seal their fate as it will install malware on their system.

At present, the most common malware deployed via this campaign is RedLine Stealer which steals stored passwords, cookies, saved payment card information, and cryptocurrency wallet information. So if it lands on your system or finds its way into your company’s network it can deal significant damage with long lasting consequences.

The worst part of all this is that Microsoft has unintentionally made the issue worse than it needs to be.  There are a great many Windows 10 users who cannot get Windows 11 from official distribution channels due to hardware incompatibilities. That has created an enormous opportunity for hackers around the world and they are wasting no time exploiting that opportunity.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

The San Francisco 49ers Recently Hit With Ransomware Attack

Hackers will attack absolutely anybody.  No one is safe and nothing is sacred.  Not even football is safe.

The most recent high-profile attack was made against the San Francisco 49ers according to BleepingComputer which got confirmation from the 49ers.

According to the information disclosed by the 49ers they are in the process of recovering from an attack by the BlackByte ransomware gang which caused a “temporary disruption” of parts of the 49ers IT infrastructure.

Currently we have few details.  We do not know for example whether the BlackByte gang was able to successfully deploy their ransomware. We cannot confirm the gang’s claims that they stole data from the football organization.

Their official disclosure statement reads in part, as follows:

“The San Francisco 49ers recently became aware of a network security incident that resulted in temporary disruption to certain systems on our corporate IT network. Upon learning of the incident, we immediately initiated an investigation and took steps to contain the incident.

Third-party cybersecurity firms were engaged to assist, and law enforcement was notified.

While the investigation is ongoing, we believe the incident is limited to our corporate IT network; to date, we have no indication that this incident involves systems outside of our corporate network, such as those connected to Levi’s Stadium operations or ticket holders.

As the investigation continues, we are working diligently to restore involved systems as quickly and as safely as possible.”

While the BlackByte gang isn’t particularly active, security professionals have been aware of their activities since July 2021. They have taken down their share of relatively high-profile targets and are certainly not to be ignored.

The lesson here is simple.  No matter who you are you are not safe.  The hackers don’t care and they will come for you.  Stay vigilant out there because 2022 is just getting started.

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