Keeping you up to date on the latest in tech and cyber. Feel free to forward to interested colleagues and acquaintances.

This week we have news on some worrying developments in cyber attacks with AI, a major breach story, and some good news for collaborative file editing.

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Deep Phishing

Cyber criminals are taking advantage of AI to generate deeply personalized and complex attacks, known as Deep Fakes. Like the Wolf dawning Grandma’s garbs to fool Little Red Riding Hood, scam artists can impersonate trusted parties like never before to bring down our guards. By formulating attacks via AI with information that would seemingly be too uniquely accurate to be a scam, people are more susceptible to becoming victims of fraud than ever before.

Bloomberg reports that Banks are expecting Cyber Crime to cost $8 trillion this year, and on track for $10.5 Trillion in 2025. With the ability to create innumerable individualized attacks, the protectors of Cyber Security are having to ramp up efforts to avoid losing the battle against criminals. It will take a culture of Cyber awareness and increased education to put up a fight.

Many organizations are reporting very specific attack vectors that are so skillfully crafted to impersonate their usual vendors and clients, that they are worried at the increased possibility of personnel taking the bait. AI can generate all types of sophisticated impersonations from voice clones, visuals, and language patterns, pushing the limits of what the rational mind can differentiate between real and fake.

Learn how you can combat the coming cyber struggles with SecureWorks and our new advanced email protection service.

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MOVE it on Down the Road

The Cyber Security landscape mounts up as larger, more critical, infrastructure is increasingly targeted.

The MOVEit file service ransomware attack had the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) lost without direction. Anyone with a state issued ID or Drivers License had their information compromised, including details like name, address, and social security number. The massive scope of the data breach, affecting over 3.5 million people, left ODOT in shock and they did not make any acknowledgment of the attack for months. Claiming they didn’t want to release any statements until after a forensic investigation, which took several months to complete following the breach.

Once ODOT finally publicly addressed the hack, surprised Oregonians expressed their fears of widespread identity theft and were disgruntled at being unaware for months that their personal information was caught in the dark web. Furthermore, ODOT was just one entity that was affected by the worldwide ransomware attack on MOVEit.

Government services are clearly in hacker’s sights, and data from the UK Govt. shows that the larger your organization is, the more likely you are to be targeted. Do you know anyone lacking secure file services? Have them contact JustWorks today and we can deploy secure file systems for their IT.

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Easy Co-Editing

Egnyte recently released an integration with Microsoft Office 365, allowing you to Co-Edit files simultaneously with other colleagues. Have a PowerPoint or Excel document that you and your team are completing? Well, now you no longer have to worry about who works on the file, or when. Co-Edit allows everyone to access the same file, at the same time, so that projects can progress with real time collaboration ensuring all edits are captured in one file. This means no one is stuck waiting for their turn, and you won’t have worry about checking multiple file versions to capture everyone’s edits. All of this works directly inside your desktop Office 365 apps, providing full utilization of computing power compared to web based collaboration.

With the new PDF Viewer and Editor in the Web UI, working on documents is significantly streamlined.

No longer will you need to save files locally and then open them with specific PDF editing apps. The PDF Viewer allows you to view any PDF directly in a browser, while the Editor allows editing directly inside the viewer with 30+ annotation, form filling, and form creation tools. Now you can make changes from anywhere, and on any device.

Contact us if you’re interested in using these new features.

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CyberNews Archive

Keeping you up to date on the latest in tech and cyber. Feel free to forward to interested colleagues and acquaintances.

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Chat Bot not Jackpot: Chat GPT & IT Solutions

Chat GPT and other AI platforms are being scrutinized for their potential to solve problems at a speed and scale exceeding human norms. What human lead tasks today would be done more efficiently and could be replaced fully by AI in the future?

While many people’s considerations drift to the hypothetical endgame of idealized Artificial Intelligence, JustWorks maintains a realistic outlook on computer generated responses and have thoroughly tested Chat GPT’s ability to solve technical problems – one might think that IT would be a field in which Chat GPT would excel. However, our testing has showed that Chat GPT is only provides the correct response to a wide variety of IT problems around half of the time. This is largely due to two of AI’s limits:

• How it is prompted (hard to do!)
• Only being able to draw conclusions from the data set it is trained on

As IT Solutionaries, we know that effective service results from the ability to solve novel issues as they arise. In a fast paced environment where issues need to be resolved accurately and in a timely manner, there simply isn’t room for this degree of error.

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The Bay Area Cools Off

Businesses in the Bay Area saw employment costs heat up as wages rose at an accelerated rate in 2021/22. However, it appears the climate is shifting as companies adjust to post-pandemic conditions.

Early this year, we reported on tech companies lightening payroll with large job cuts as financial tides went out. Data from the Labor Department shows, these loses have taken a toll on Silicon Valley with counties reporting average weekly salaries decreases of around 20 percent compared to 2021 !

It appears companies are looking to the horizon and choosing to keep those vital jobs which keep the cogs turning and shying away from highly specialized and cost intensive positions. Many organizations across The Bay Area are likely relieved to see they are not going to be priced out of the market for finding the right talent.

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Sophos Adaptive Attack Protection

Sophos recently added the ability for Sophos Endpoint to dynamically apply active protection when an on hands keyboard attack is detected. This is next level capability can recognize malicious behaviors in real-time and gives customers valuable time to neutralize active adversaries before a breach occurs. Interest in Adaptive Attack Protection is widespread as companies face the threat of insider attacks with growing numbers of non-localized workers and handling the challenges of complying with cyber security standards with on-site visitors. Watch how

Sophos continues to top the G2 Grid® as the only cybersecurity provider that qualifies as a Leader across:

• Endpoint Protection Suites
• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
• Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
• Firewall Software
• Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

G2 independent, verified customers rated Sophos the #1 overall XDR and Firewall solutions. We have many years of experience implementing Sophos to provide the best cyber security for our customers.

If you’d like to know how you can utilize Sophos to achieve the best protection, give us a call on 866-JUSTWOR or email info@justworks.net

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CyberNews Archive

Keeping you up to date on the latest in tech and cyber. Feel free to forward to interested colleagues and acquaintances.

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Ransomware on the Rise

Cyber Security becomes more valuable by the day as attacks increase in frequency and complexity.

Microsoft reports they experience 300 million fraudulent attempts to access their cloud services everyday. Sophos reports on providers of “hacking as a service” increasing through 2022 and into this year.

At this rate, insurance execs are warning that Cyber attacks will soon be joining Natural Disasters in being uninsurable. The enormity of the impacts cyber attacks could have, if critical infrastructure is targeted, is simply too large for insurance companies to anticipate and remediate.

This fear was made real here in the Bay Area when the City of Oakland recently declared a State of Emergency after it fell victim to a ransomware attack that disabled key technical infrastructure and brought city services to a halt. By encrypting Oakland’s data with their own key, the hackers now have sole control over that data and are releasing small portions of employee information to demonstrate their capability and bolster their demands. Understanding your own Cyber Security readiness is critical as threat actors increase their activity.

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Managing Your Detection and Response

At JustWorks we have been implementing the Gartner leading cybersecurity managed detection & response, Sophos MDR, for our customers to ensure they have 24/7/365 threat detection and response. Sophos’ Endpoint and Network monitoring approach ensure our customers’ IT Systems are secure no matter where they work. Utilizing AI threat identification to prevent attacks in conjunction with a dedicated team of specialized cybersecurity experts to handle the intensive work, Sophos MDR offers the best Cybersecurity as a Service, while keeping costs and resources down.

Sophos services can also help at any stage of a cyber attack. Whether you would like to assess if your data has already been compromised, or are currently in the middle of an active attack, Sophos’ round the clock SOC can respond to and resolve attacks rapidly.

If you’d like to know more about how we can implement Sophos MDR for your business systems, give us a call on 866-JUSTWOR or email info@justworks.net

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It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are logged in?

As the White House backs a Senate Bill that would ban Tik Tok for Federal Employees, it’s time to think about what apps your family is giving their information to. This short and very polished film by the Financial Times highlights the challenges for managing identity security for youth in today’s digital society.

Watch it at home with your family to get a conversation started.

Keeping you up to date on the latest in tech and cyber. Feel free to forward to interested colleagues and acquaintances.

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2023 kicks off with tech turmoil

Seems like every tech business in California is rushing to lighten their payroll ahead of what many expect to be a tough year ahead. Even Microsoft!

This is when the tide goes out and we all find out who has been swimming naked. With so many tech businesses based on new revenue models, who will survive the coming changes ?

Evaluating tech vendors is what we do at JustWorks. It requires in-depth knowledge of the tech industry, the history of firms (who has bought who recently), technical evaluation of the products/services they offer, analysis of each vendor’s cyber security posture, and market intelligence to determine if they have a sustainable position against their competition. This is not work that most companies can do for themselves, which is why vendor selection is large part of our work and a significant value we add for our customers.

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The End of Passwords …

Bill Gates predicted the death of the password around 15 years ago. In fact, password use has risen, and they remain the default method of authentication for a huge range of services, both at work and home. 

Increasingly complex password requirements place an unrealistic demand on users. Inevitably, users devise their own coping mechanisms to cope with ‘password overload’. This includes re-using the same password across different systems, using simple and predictable password creation strategies. Sound familiar?

Every company needs to do 3 things right now to stop password overload becoming a cyber security threat to the business:

• Stop making users change their passwords!
• Turn on MFA for all remote access. Make every login a proper security check. If the login is at an unusual time of day or from a new location/computer/browser, then ask for another security factor.
• Get a Business subscription to 1Password. Inevitably there will be passwords that need to be shared across teams and you need to have vaults that are controlled by the company, not the user! Every employee added to a 1Password Business accounts get a free subscription for their personal/family use.

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ZTNA is coming in February

We are excited to announce that JustWorks is adding Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) from Sophos to our fixed fee services starting in just a few days.

Zero trust refers to a way of controlling access where every request is validated from the ground up and permission is only granted when a valid user authenticates themselves on an approved computer to access an application they are authorized for.

If you’d like to know more “zero trust” for your business systems, give us a call on 866-JUSTWOR to email info@justworks.net

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CyberNews Archive