Message from General Computer Development 

Stay alert, Stay cautious: Don't be tricked by Scammers

Don't be tricked by robocalls and email from scammers who want to get access to your email, accounts, and passwords.  Always be suspicious of soliciting calls, letters, and emails. 

Do's

• Spot imposters. Scammers often pretend to be someone you trust.

• Do online searches. Type a company or product name into your favorite search engine with the words like "review", "complaint" or "scam".

• Don't believe your caller ID.  Technology makes it easy for scammers to fake caller ID information. 
• Don't ever pay anything.  First verify or call them back at a number that is found by you about the company and their public records.
• Hang up on robocalls. If you answer the phone and hear a recorded sales pitch, hang up and report it to the FTC.
• Sign up for free scam alerts from the FTC at ftc.gov/scams

Don’t respond to these lures

• Messages that appear to be from Microsoft, Apple or a known source asking you for your credit card number to pay for support or buy something for the company.
• Error messages on websites you visit urging you to respond and provide a credit card number for help. 
• Full screen and pop-up messages that won’t go away—essentially locking your browser until you respond 
• Urgent messages to call a bogus support number or visit a malicious website to fix a problem.

Avoid being scammed  

• Don’t visit a website or call the number provided.  
• Don’t download or install software.

GCD Security Recommendations

• Implement multi-factor authentication (2-step authentication).
  
• Create a back-up plan of your data.
  
• Password Hygiene: Ensure passwords are unique, difficult to guess, and hard to crack.
• Educate Staff: Train your users to spot threats.
• Integrate Security in everything you do. 
• Establish an Incident Report Plan and Practice it.

Think you are being (or have been) scammed? 

• Call GCD immediately. We can remove applications that may have been installed, run a full scan to remove malware, apply updates, and change your password. In some cases, we may have to re-image your computer.  
• Call your credit card provider to contest charges. 

1. Alert issued by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued and alert to U.S. businesses to prepare themselves for a potential cyber-attack related to the Ukraine situation. 

The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has issued a “Shields Up” warning, and has asked that all organizations, regardless of size, adopt a heightened cybersecurity posture. 

Some of the actions are listed below:

• Leverage multifactor authentication to restrict access to known-trusted source

• Rigorous patch-management to remediate known vulnerabilities

• Quickly respond to zero-day threats as they emerge

• Utilize advanced machine-learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to detect patterns of activity pointing to potential intrusions by bad actors

• Step up threat-hunting efforts to identify the presence of bad-actors on the network

• Validate backups are working and recoverable

You can help us by being our eyes and ears and reporting suspicious activity. While we have strong controls and tools in place to keep your environment protected, sometimes things slip through. 

Please stay vigilant and report issues to the GCD team that are suspicious in nature, especially phishing and text scams. 

2. Save your work in SharePoint and Cloud Storage

It is very important to stay in the habit of saving your data in SharePoint or other cloud storage services you are currently using. This practice saves time and money during data recovery process due to hardware or software failure, or cyber attacks. 

3. Office 2013 end of support

Reduce your exposure to security risks by moving to a newer version of Office. Office 2013 will end support on April 11, 2023. Please start upgrading to Microsoft 365 Apps, which is designed to receive regular updates, and will help you stay current by getting security updates and our latest features. 

4. IE11 desktop application retires 

Internet Explorer (IE) 11 desktop application will be retired on June 15, 2022, on certain versions of Windows 10. This means the application will no longer be supported and will be progressively redirected to Microsoft Edge over the following months. The IE11 desktop application is not available in Windows 11. 

To continue using legacy IE-based sites and apps on Windows 11, IE mode in Microsoft Edge must be configured before deploying Windows 11. 

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