Have you ever had this happen to you? You’re on your way to a big presentation. You’ve been prepping for days, rehearsing what you are going to say, giving yourself pep talks in the mirror, and have put together a great report.

The last thing you need to do before you step out the door is print—and the printer picks that moment to screw up (my personal favorite is the “printer is offline” error message when it’s not offline).

All of us have been there at some point: dealing with a printer that just doesn’t seem to want to work. It always feels like it comes at the worst possible time, too. It’s one of the most common issues we see as an IT support company, and we experience it in our own business, too.

Thankfully, most printer issues can be solved with basic troubleshooting steps. These are the first few steps we typically take when working on a printer issue:

These days, most cyberattacks are at the account level. If a cybercriminal gets into your account (whether it’s your work account or personal account), they can use it to steal your assets, sell your information on the black market, get access to other accounts, and launch more cyberattacks.

So, what can you do? Two-factor authentication (also called multi-factor authentication) can stop a cyberattack in tracks. In some cases, it can save you even after falling victim to an attack.

When is the last time you said to yourself “I wish I could spend more time dealing with email – I just love sorting through it.” Probably never, right? For most people, email is a necessary evil.

We got a letter recently, alerting us that our domain name is expiring soon. The letter, which looks a lot like an invoice, goes on to state we can renew our domain and add-on similar available domains for an additional fee. It includes our correct domain URL and our actual expiration date.

Except this letter isn’t from our domain provider. It’s from a company trying to get us to move our domain to them for several times what we pay our current provider. They aren’t really cybercriminals. It’s not even technically a scam if they do provide domain hosting services (though we do note, this only mentions how to give them money, and nothing about how to actually move your domain—which is a pretty complicated process). But it is deceptive marketing (at best).

In 2017, nearly $1 billion was “diverted or attempted to be diverted” from real estate transactions by cybercriminals. Real Estate is one of the top industries targeted by cybercriminals for both phishing attacks and malware attacks, according to the Symantec 2018 Internet Threat Report.

So why is the Real Estate industry such a big target for cybercriminals? Because it’s an easy target with a potentially big payday. So many things that would be a red flag for other industries are day-to-day operations in real estate.

When we first wrote this comparison in 2015, Sway was a new app from Microsoft. It was fun and had its applications but was a little limited in scope. Since then, Microsoft has added a lot of new features, making this lesser known app a powerful tool for building interactive presentations.

But the question remains – Why would you use Sway to make a presentation when PowerPoint already exists? What’s the difference?

Smaller businesses typically only have a single person at the top – the business owner/CEO. That person is also responsible for many of the other executive functions of the organization as well – such as Human Resources, Finance, Technology, and Sales.

When your business hits a certain size, though, it can be challenging to balance all of these roles while still running the company. When this happens, companies will often hire subject matter experts to oversee each of these roles. Typically, the workload is more than the CEO can handle alone, but not enough to justify a full-time hire.

One of the most common tactics cybercriminals use when targeting small and midsize businesses in phishing attacks in the form of fake notifications. These are usually meant to try to scare you into some action with messages like “Your account will be suspended in 24 hours.”

These attacks rely on fake messages that the app or service doesn’t actually send. This Office 365 phishing email is an excellent example of that—Microsoft doesn’t actually send you any emails saying your account has been suspended (you WILL get notifications that your credit card has expired).

But cybercriminals are getting better. They’re paying attention to what notifications popular companies do send and duplicating those in phishing attacks. And they’re pretty tricky to spot. Let’s look at this example we were sent recently.

Making your to-do list shouldn’t have to be its own item on your to-do list. Automating some of your to-do list items can help save you a little time and prevent tasks from falling through the cracks.

Microsoft has two lesser-known, but useful apps called Flow and To-Do, that can help you do just that. Both the apps are free for anyone to use.

A common saying in the cybersecurity world is “There are two kinds of companies: those that have been breached and those that just don’t know it yet.” The scariest part of this phrase is the “just don’t know it yet.” No breach is good, but at least when you know about it, you can start taking steps to remedy it.

These days, many cybercriminals lie in wait and hide inside of compromised systems, often for months, before making a move.