MSPNetworks Blog

Text messages are great. They’re a quick and effective means for us all to communicate. 

Unfortunately, this does bring some downsides, too… namely, they’re a relatively simple means for a scammer to spread their attacks. Let’s discuss why this is so dangerous and how you can identify and avoid these threats.

Does your technology need an upgrade? Now might be the perfect time to get on it, especially since hardware prices are expected to rise dramatically this year. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits you can expect from working with us when outfitting your business with new technology.

As a provider of information technology services and support, a big part of our job is helping the businesses we work with make the best decisions regarding their critical IT. This responsibility means we often provide an advisory role to business leaders.

In that role, we strongly advise that you make any intended technology purchases and upgrades right now… because if you wait, you may have no good options left.

Artificial intelligence is the latest IT buzzword that everyone seems to focus on and it’s because it is a big deal. Advances in computing have created an environment where developers can create software that effectively learns. Unfortunately, due to the nature of AI regulation; or, the complete lack of it, there are some who are concerned that the technology—which could be a revolutionary tool for the improvement of human societies—is being degraded.

Can you tell the difference between your colleagues and a scammer with access to their email account? This is essentially what a business email compromise attack involves—a scammer initiates a phishing scheme using an internal mode of communication. These scams are also observed in schools, making them dangerous in the education sector.

You might remember the buzz when Josh Allen, a digital artist, won first place at the 2022 Colorado State Fair for his digital artwork called "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial." The catch? He created the image using AI. Now, he’s in a fight with the Copyright Office to prove that his work deserves copyright protection.

Over the past few years, huge scamming operations have operated in Southeast Asia, and now they are spreading. These scams—known as pig butchering scams—cause serious harm, as in an estimated $75 billion worldwide in 2023.

With these sorts of operations spreading, let’s go over what pig butchering is. 

Funerals are never to be taken lightly, which makes it all the worse that there are people out there willing to use these events to scam those in grief. Recently, Facebook has seen many groups that supposedly offer links to streamed funerals in exchange for credit card data, with different events being added more recently.

Sorry for the loaded title. There’s a lot to talk about, even for those of you who don’t use or even know what Telegram is.

We’ll try to sum this up, because we think there is a lot to say about security and the nature of technology in this, and like all things these days, there’s some odd rabble-rousing about this whole series of events. Who’s up for a wild ride?

In the wake of Hurricane Beryl, businesses have another reason to reflect on data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Since the hurricane made landfall in Texas, despite being downgraded to a tropical storm, it still caused over $5 million in damage to islands across middle America.

One of the best things about the move towards streaming in media is that since people love watching real-life stories, studios have committed to creating documentary content that provides interesting perspectives. Many people don’t have a comprehensive understanding of technology, especially as it relates to real-world situations, so dramatized documentaries can be a good source of information. Today, we’re going to go through three riveting technology documentaries that are available on streaming services.

Nowadays, finding a business that does not use technology in its everyday processes would be extremely challenging. That’s just how things are today. This technology also typically sees advances in capabilities and accessibility, particularly for the small and medium-sized business sectors. This year, 2024, seems poised to be no exception.

Artificial intelligence is a hot-button issue in today’s business technology landscape, and for good reason. It’s being implemented in various software tools and platforms with mixed results. There are some concerns over it, particularly in regard to intellectual property, but there are also major issues with it related to “the profound risks to society and humanity,” according to an open letter.

An Open Letter Calls for a Pause on AI Development

With tens of thousands of signatures, the short letter cautioned against the unfettered growth of AI without a greater appreciation of the potential outcomes.

There are many reasons why people are concerned, including present, short-term, and long-term ramifications of the continued development of AI programs.

Misinformation is a Short-Term Issue

Generative AI uses already existing content in its creation, meaning that it can also call upon information that is blatantly false, leading to the perpetuation of it. Considering how many people rely on the Internet for answers to their important questions, well, AI could only make it worse by showing the wrong answers. These falsehoods can even be made more convincing by the use of AI.

Developers could even use AI to spread misinformation intentionally, which is a serious problem that has many concerned.

Job Loss Could Become a Problem, Too

Some technology experts also believe that AI could lead to many employees losing their jobs due to their work becoming obsolete. Knowledge-based careers require more practical skills than AI can replicate, but other roles could be entirely eliminated as a result of advancing AI.

Long-Term AI Could Pose an “Existential Risk” to Humanity

While this might sound like an extreme stance, it’s one that is becoming more popular thanks to the Future of Life Institute, an organization that tries to predict “existential risks to humanity.” AI could disrupt the future if it can learn to write its own code, and the Future of Life Institute outlines how this could be problematic in its open letter.

Likewise, the Center for AI Safety has collected signatures in support of their own brief statement:

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

There are Only Predictions at the Moment, but AI is a Challenge to Address

AI certainly seems to be a controversial technological advancement, but this is usually what happens when new and exciting things are developed. Only time will tell if AI becomes truly problematic for the business world or if it will just become another tool in our toolboxes.

To learn more about other technology and how it can improve your operations, be sure to contact MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001.

Google’s Project Zero team has discovered 18 zero-day vulnerabilities impacting the Samsung Exynos modems—four of which enable remote code execution. Let’s talk about what this issue does, and what needs to be done to minimize risk.

These Threats are Severe and Need to Be Addressed

Without going too far into the weeds, some of these vulnerabilities—which, in addition to mobile devices, were also identified in wearables and vehicles—can be carried out with the attacker only knowing the target’s phone number and can give the attacker access to the device with no need for the target to provide access. In fact, a vulnerable device could be compromised without the target even being made aware.

Samsung’s list of impacted devices includes:

• Samsung mobile devices, including those in the S22, M33, M13, M12, A71, A53, A33, A21, A13, A12 and A04 series
• Vivo mobile devices, including those in the S16, S15, S6, X70, X60 and X30 series
• Google’s Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series

Plus, any wearables that use the Exynos W920 chipset and vehicles with the Exynos Auto T5123 chipset are also impacted. It is also important to note that this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Patches Aren’t All Available as Of Yet, But There is a Fix

Because this issue impacts devices from so many vendors and manufacturers, patches aren’t necessarily available for everything that is going to be impacted. However, you should disable Wi-Fi calling and Voice-over-LTE to prevent the threat, and update your devices when patches are released.

For most of the common smartphones, like the recent Google Pixel phones and Samsung Galaxy phones, these updates were pushed out in the March security patch. If you own these devices, you need to make sure you apply these updates because not doing so will leave your device extremely vulnerable to attack.

We’re Here to Help You Manage the Complicated IT Businesses Require

Reach out to us for any assistance needed with implementing these fixes, or any of the rest of your IT. Call us at (516) 403-9001 today for help.

At the beginning of September, it was revealed that a relatively simple issue existed in nearly 2,000 mobile applications that potentially exposed some (read: a lot of) sensitive data. Let’s take a brief, basic look at the situation to see if there are any lessons that can apply to your business.

Trust us, there will be.

In Essence, the Issue is One of Access Permissions

Let’s go over how these apps generally work.

Naturally, the apps that you use on your phone aren’t fully hosted on your device. Instead, they are commonly hosted in cloud services. In theory, the application you install effectively just contains hardcoded access credentials that allow you to access the data or the service that application provides.

Notice that we said, in theory. Research conducted by Broadcom’s Symantec Threat Hunter team revealed that these purportedly single-purpose logins were able to access all of the files that a cloud service contained—including company data, backups of databases, and system controls.

Worse, if multiple apps included the same publicly available software development kits (SDKs) or were created by a single company, these login credentials could potentially grant access to numerous applications, exposing the infrastructure and user data of each.

So, let’s say that an attacker happened to obtain these access tokens. With the situation being the way it is, that would give the attacker access to all of the applications—and more critically, the user data these applications contain—that the access tokens granted access to.

Between the Android and iOS platforms, researchers found almost 2,000 applications that had their credentials hard-coded to Amazon Web Services—three-quarters of those granting access to private cloud services (and half of those granting access to private files), with about half containing access tokens found in completely unrelated applications.

So, What Does This Have to Do With Your Business?

Let me ask you something: who in your business could potentially access your payroll information, your employees’ private information, or all the financial data you’ve collected from your clientele and workforce alike?

This idea that certain information is accessible by those who shouldn’t have access to it is the crux of the issue. You need to ensure that your data and files are only accessible to those who need them for their work responsibilities. This is known as the principle of least privilege—basically, all access and information are distributed on a need-to-know basis, based on the responsibilities of the individual users.

In short, much like these applications should have been doing, you need to ensure that access to this data is locked down. We can help.

Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about how we can help you.

It is a legitimate question whether something is actually art if it isn’t created by a human being. That’s before you are exposed to it, however. In fact, an AI created a piece of art that was crowned the winner at the Colorado State Fair. Let’s take a look at AI art in the context of this competition.

Let’s dive in.

Are AI-Generated Images Art?

At the Colorado State Fair, there is a fine arts competition where Josh Allen won the first place prize in Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography for his image, “Théåtre D'opéra Spatial.” When Allen provided a glimpse into his process via Discord, however, he was met with scrutiny. He used an image synthesis model called Midjourney to create the image.

As Allen said in his Discord post, he “...created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after upscaling with Gigapixel A.I.” As he reports, he “could not be more excited” that his “favorite piece” ultimately won.

The rest of the community was a bit more critical of Allen’s choice. The image was produced with little actual hands-on work from Allen. Instead, it was built using the input that he plugged into the Midjourney platform. Allen wrote in his official submission, “I generate images with MJ, do passes with Photoshop, and upscale with GigaPixel,” and even labeled his piece with “Jason Allen via Midjourney.”

As you might not be surprised to hear, people have opinions on this topic, and many of these opinions cannot in good conscience be shared here. Still, there are many who believe that AI-generated art signifies the “death of artistry” and wonder “if creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete [sic] What will we have then?”

Art is Created and Judged In Accordance with the Technology of the Time

We understand why this has people concerned, but the fact remains that the tools we use today are simply taken for granted. An artist named Rhea Edge listed tools, techniques, and artists that use them, as well as when the tools were introduced, then shows that these tools also were not received well at the time.

In particular, Edge discusses the development of the camera obscura, a darkened room with a small hole in one side that allowed images to be projected onto a wall. This photography went on to inspire innovations in the art that are seen in modern day photography at large. Tubed paint was also a problematic topic due to artists not mixing their own paints. Artists were criticized right up until the 1970s and 1980s for these practices.

Edge also points out that art tends to change over time, highlighting how long it took the Impressionist painting style to really become an established style in the art world.

One other artist named Brian Simpson examines technology’s role in the development of art. He indicates that miniature portraits were essentially cut out entirely by the advent of photography. Simpson is also an advocate for Allen’s AI-produced artwork.

“There is a mind behind it. The mind is deciding I want this image. And with this image, this is the word I want to use,” Simpson said, going on to reflect on how Allen produced 40 images, ultimately choosing the ones he submitted.

“You can argue that choice and self-curation is part of the art process,” said Simpson.

This statement makes it clear that the current state of image creation and artwork still involves much human interaction, especially to achieve outstanding results like with Allen’s piece. How long this remains the case, however, is yet to be determined.

What are your thoughts on AI-generated artwork? Do you have any strong opinions on this topic? Be sure to share them in the comments below—and remember that AI is very well-established in the business world, so consider implementing it for your own company’s needs!

2023 is right around the corner, and if the past few years are any indication, it will be rife with challenges for businesses to overcome. Let’s consider some of these challenges, and what technologies can help minimize or even eliminate them.

Inflation and Supply Chain Issues Will Likely Continue

Unfortunately, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy is expected to persist throughout 2023. Exacerbating these issues, the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia has not helped matters in terms of supply chain stability. Now and moving forward, businesses need to plan for any supply chain disruptions or impacts of inflation…but how can this be accomplished?

When economic conditions are fraught with such risk, it is important that you are able to identify how vulnerable your operations are to the whims of the aforementioned challenges. By doing so, you’ll be in a better position to minimize or completely eliminate your vulnerability to these factors.

Customer Experience and Sustainability Will Be Priorities

Based on how 2023 looks to be shaping up, it will be important for you to address your customers’, clients’, and prospects’ priorities—which seem to be focused on sustainable operations. With more focus put on a company’s stance on assorted social and environmental issues, it will be important that businesses are able to identify where their current strategies and initiatives may be received poorly or have a negative impact on the company’s reputation—including those strategies that involve external parties, like cloud providers and the data centers they rely on, and how the impacts these parties have affected the business by association. 

Likewise, your customers, clients, and prospects need more than just the assurance that you’re operating in an environmentally conscious way…they will want to be wooed, and in a more personalized and interactive way. This will also require the right IT to be in place, deployed so that workflows are streamlined and enhanced through technologies that have developed to the point that many of these responsibilities are resolved through automation. This not only ensures that the right processes are carried out in a timely manner, it allows your team members to divert their energies toward more gainful endeavors.

Employee Retention Will Require Effort

Since the onset of the pandemic, many businesses have struggled to keep their employees engaged, with many of these workers either leaving work as part of what has been called “The Great Resignation,” or participating in the more recent trend of “quiet quitting,” or strictly adhering to exclusively the responsibilities outlined in their job description and doing nothing more.

It is on the employer to then work to retain their employees through meaningful and fulfilling work and the benefits associated with it. Allowing for hybrid work is a great means of doing so, along with opportunities for upward mobility and increased pay and benefits.

What is Your Business Doing to Prepare for 2023?

Whatever it is, MSPNetworks can help you manage the IT that it requires. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to speak to us about what we can do for you.

With inflation proving to be a significant concern for businesses at the moment, reaching highs that it hasn’t in decades, there is a distinct need for businesses to get as much value as they can out of the investments they make.

Let’s discuss a few technologies that offer this more desirable cost/benefit ratio so you can consider them for your own use.

Could Technology Investment Reverse Inflation?

According to Morgan Stanley, potentially!

The financial services provider recently released their list of (as they call them) Deflation Enablers—companies that are trying to cut their customers’ costs despite inflation or product scarcity. Included on this list were a few automation platforms (Appian, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and UiPath) as well as supply chain efficiency software (C3.ai, Palantir, and Snowflake) as well as some other technology providers, like a little company known as Microsoft.

The idea is that by investing in solutions and services provided by Deflation Enablers—specifically, those that cut costs while boosting productivity—a business puts itself in a position to succeed, in spite of whatever economic challenges the world at large is facing.

Of course, that’s all well and good for these major companies… But what can the average business in New York do?  

What Many Companies Are Doing to Fight Inflation

There are a variety of ways that businesses can do (and are exploring) to save money and actively use their resources more efficiently. One big one that came about in response to the last few years’ increase in remote operations: office downsizing.

Businesses of all sizes, from small to enterprise, are actively considering how they can scale back their real estate and reinvest those dollars elsewhere—incidentally, many choosing to invest in IT and sales.

This is no accident, either. Remember, quite a few of Morgan Stanley’s Deflation Enablers were IT providers that focused on automating processes. Automation is inherently a cost-saving endeavor, as it effectively doubles your productivity for each employee it frees from a menial task.

Reach out to MSPNetworks to find out more about automation, and the other ways we can assist you in making your dollar go further. A few examples that come to mind are our inclusive managed services and our remote monitoring and management services.

Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.

The average person will spend an estimated one-third of their life at work. One third. That’s a lot of time, providing plenty of opportunity to accumulate stress. Over time, these emotions could potentially overwhelm your employees and lead to a breakdown. This is, naturally, harmful to your business, so let’s explore some strategies you can share with your team to help them deal with their workday stresses.

Separate Yourself from Your Stress

The feeling of rising stress is unmistakable, particularly when you’ve experienced it before. Sometimes, escaping this stress is a matter of actually moving yourself away from it. Take a break, walk away, and do some deep breathing. Removing yourself from the situation can make all the difference, allowing you to rally and recover.

On the emotional side of things, practice looking at things from an outside perspective. While the situation will still be stressful, doing your best to take yourself out of it and considering it as though it is happening to someone else can help to take off the pressure until you can collect yourself. It can also give you the insight needed to see the stress-inducing issues from a new perspective, allowing you to solve them more effectively. 

Identify What Triggers Your Stress

If you want to avoid emotional breakdowns at work, it’s important that you are able to figure out what sets you off so that you can adjust to avoid or minimize them. For instance, maybe you have a rough time handling criticism, or you get a little bit of stage fright while making a presentation. Once you’ve identified these triggers, you can start to create techniques to help you manage your response…maybe a quick conversation with a trusted coworker before you have to speak, or (as we alluded to above) taking a walk to process the criticism you’ve received. 

Work Through Emotions

Speaking of processing criticism, it’s important that any and all negative feelings are appropriately dealt with so that they don’t interfere with workplace processes or relationships. Simply trying to push these feelings down and lock them away is exhausting and, frankly, unsustainable. This is why it is so important to take the time to process these emotions before they lead to the dreaded meltdown.

Have a Recovery Strategy

However, in the event that your emotions do get the better of you in the office, you need to be able to recover. Fortunately, there’s precedent that says that associating these kinds of emotions with your commitment to your job helps others in the office to see them less negatively—research conducted by Harvard Business School says as much. Explain that the stress is borne of a desire to see personal and organizational success, and try to manage your emotions better the next time.

The Right Technology Can Help Cut Down on Workplace Stress

While we would never suggest that all stress will be eliminated with a few IT improvements, it can certainly help simplify a lot of things in the workplace. Reach out to us for assistance in managing your IT so that’s one less source of stress for you and your team. Call (516) 403-9001 today.

With such a heavy focus on remote work over the past year or so, if you have tried to procure equipment or technology solutions during this period, you may have noticed that it is much harder than usual to do so. The global chip shortage has led to many challenges for organizations, chief among them getting the parts needed to put together critical technology solutions. This opens up a whole other set of issues, though, particularly in regards to disruption of the supply chain.

First, a little bit of background regarding this issue. With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting the world so profoundly, the increase in demand for remote technology triggered a massive shortage in the global semiconductor market. So many companies and organizations rushed to purchase new technology to keep their own operations from sinking that the companies responsible for manufacturing semiconductors simply could not keep up with the demand. This demand for semiconductors has had significant impacts on manufacturers of just about all electronics, including the appliance and automobile industries.

Gartner predicts that this shortage will likely last well into 2022, a notion that has turned many organizations and businesses toward finding alternative solutions to their semiconductor shortage woes, lest they suffer from an inability to continue operations. Industry professionals, however, worry that this shortage of parts might open up opportunities for scammers to manufacture and sell fraudulent components.

According to ZDNet, the possibility for fraudsters to take advantage of this opportunity by producing counterfeit products is a very real issue that cannot be avoided. ZDNet reports that there is a precedent for this happening, like with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan; this triggered a shortage of capacitors for medical devices, a shortage that fraudsters took advantage of by producing counterfeit products.

As for whether or not these counterfeit products are problematic, the answer is a resounding “yes,” but probably not for the reasons that you might suspect. In most cases, the counterfeit semiconductors themselves are either manufactured to appear legitimate or to imitate the real deal, or they are components that have been stripped of all branding and repackaged for resale. In both cases, according to ZDNet, these fraudulent components are not subject to the rigorous quality control procedures that large manufacturers have in place, meaning that they might pass basic quality control checks, but are simply not sustainable long-term.

Now, consider what might happen to businesses or manufacturers who procure these counterfeit products and integrate them into their supply chain and processes. Suddenly these components are actively being used in the same way that real components that have been tested are. What happens when these components fail and lead to disaster? It’s a position that no business wants to find itself in.

When it comes to procuring equipment for your business, you can trust that MSPNetworks will help you get the best deals and the best components for your business. We work with trusted vendors to ensure that you are not shortchanged by unfortunate trends in the market, and since we only work with vendors we trust, you can know with confidence that you are getting devices and components that are legitimate.

To learn more about what we can do for your business, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.