Since You're Here (April 2024)

Welcome to the second 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!

At first glance I thought this was an easy answer: It's the more seasoned of us who are more trusting and fall for online, email, text and social media scams.

Turns out, I was wrong. It's a lot of us that are digital natives (we've grown up with technology at our fingertips) being targeted and falling for scams. This includes everything from giving away out email credentials to reading out the text codes that we receive to scammers over the phone. Here is an article that was written late last year about this very thing. Everyone keeps your antennas up at all time for the bad actors that want your info!

 https://tech.co/news/gen-z-online-scams-boomers

A lot of major companies with 10s of millions of users have experienced data breaches recently. AT&T & Roku are among them. I highly recommend that everyone go to:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

and check to see what breaches ALL of your email addresses may have been a part of recently.

Anytime you receive a notice from a company that your account has been or even may have been compromised change the password, and if the account hasn't already been secured with MFA/2FA (muti-factor/2-factor authentication) do it at that time. Here are links to a couple of articles about the AT&T and Roku breaches:

https://tech.co/news/att-data-breach-free-security-bundle

https://tech.co/news/roku-new-hacked-accounts

Here's an article from last month about one of the pitfalls of AI. A lot of our tax clients experienced the effects of this and some of you may have experienced it personally. All of the talk and warnings about breaches and passwords, are to help prevent each of us from falling victim, as much as possible, to this type of result on top of having our emails compromised to send out tons of bad stuff to those who trust us:

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/tax-returns-scam-ai-cybersecurity

When I first entered the working world keyboard shortcuts weren't on my mind...at all. They seemed harder and less intuitive than just finding the right icon and clicking on it. Well, a couple of decades later I've totally changed my mind and now, I'm looking for them everywhere. They help me work faster and more efficiently because they'll often work across software and platforms and I spend a lot less time looking for icons/buttons to click on. Here's an article that has tons of Windows keyboard shortcuts. There's something here for everyone:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/work-smarter-not-harder-70-windows-11-keyboard-shortcuts-to-master-your-pc/