27Jun 2022 by nathan

Closed Monday, 4 July 2022 for Independence Day

CTC NEWS
Cyber Tech Cafe will be closed on Monday, 4 July 2022 in observance of Independence Day to enjoy time with family, friends and loved ones. We will reopen on Tuesday, 5 July 2022 at 9:00am ET. We will have on-call support available for commercial and MyIT clients via the emergency support option on the phone or by adding 'emergency' to the subject line of support email. From all of us at Cyber Tech Cafe, we wish you a happy Fourth of July and are eternally grateful to the men and women who have fought to win and preserve our freedom.
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24Jun 2022 by nathan

Delay processing support requests via email

CTC NEWS
We are currently experiencing an issue processing (receiving) support requests received via email. This includes any new requests as well as email replies to existing requests. We are working on the issue now and expect to have it resolved quickly but wanted to let everyone know. If you need immediate assistance, please call the office at 770.386.8900. Update @ 1017 - The issue appears to be that the legacy authentication (POP3 over TLS) has been phased out a little earlier than originally expected and our helpdesk / ticketing system was temporarily unable to process incoming support requests. Ultimately, we were able to move up our plan to upgrade and are now good to go.
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22Jun 2022 by nathan

June 2022 News & Updates

CTC NEWS, Industry News, Monthly Newsletters, Tech news
Multiple Zero Day Vulnerabilities - Additional details below in the Microsoft Section but there were technically three critical vulnerabilities this month, one in NFS, one in Hyper-V and one in the Microsoft Diagnostic Tool. Microsoft is (finally) retiring Internet Explorer (IE) - A side impact of this is that Intuit Quickbooks, which has long used (required) the Internet Explorer web browser, now has it's own custom browser. Windows 11 is Here - Microsoft is wasting no time getting it's new flagship desktop operating system Windows 11 rolled out to (often) unsuspecting Windows 10 users. If you find yourself the recipient of an unexpected / involuntary upgrade to Windows 11, How-To Geek has put together an excellent article on downgrading back to Windows 10.The MyIT Program is proving to be a…
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19Apr 2022 by nathan

Problem with incoming email / support tickets

CTC NEWS
We are currently troubleshooting an issue with incoming emails to our helpdesk / ticketing system. If you send in a support request and do not receive an autoreply within 5 minutes or a response from my team within one hour (during business hours), please call the main office number. Update - 2022.04.18 @ 0822 - We believe that we have identified the issue and are working to resolve it at this time. There appears to have been a scheduled task that processed email that had stopped working properly. We have it running now but there will likely be autoreplies sent this morning in response to emails sent to us yesterday.Update - 2022.04.18 @ 0842 - The earlier issue with incoming email to our helpdesk / ticketing system has been identified…
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15Apr 2022 by nathan

April 2022 News and Updates

CTC NEWS, Industry News, Monthly Newsletters, Tech news
Windows 11 is Here - Microsoft is wasting no time getting it's new flagship desktop operating system Windows 11 rolled out to (often) unsuspecting Windows 10 users. If you find yourself the recipient of an unexpected / involuntary upgrade to Windows 11, How-To Geek has put together an excellent article on downgrading back to Windows 10.Firewall as a Service - We are currently exploring an option to offer what we are calling a "Firewall as a Service" for commercial clients. This would effectively be a way to "rent" a managed firewall for a fixed monthly cost. There would be a nominal install cost as well as a monthly recurring cost to manage the firewall but no term agreement and the customer would not have to purchase the firewall. If you…
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28Mar 2022 by nathan

March 2022 News & Updates

CTC NEWS, Industry News, Monthly Newsletters, Tech news
Now Hiring - We are currently looking to hire a Senior Support Specialist to join our team. This is a full time, permanent position and hours are generally Monday through Friday, 8:00am until 5:00pm ET. If you or someone you know would be a good fit for the position, there's an online application available here.Spike in network based attacks - I reported in late February (here) that we were seeing a spike in attack traffic from IP Addresses registered to Russian and Chinese organizations. We were seeing those attacks across multiple ISPs (Comcast, Charter, AT&T, etc.) and nationwide. The initial attacks seemed focused on brute force attacks against VPN portals. The volume of the attacks has slowed significantly and the targets seem to have widened (we're still seeing brute force…
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28Feb 2022 by nathan

Sharp rise in traffic to / from Russian and Chinese IP Addresses

CTC NEWS, Industry News, Tech news
One of the services that's included in all of our MyIT plans is a weekly review of the clients firewall logs. This tends to be a win / win for us and the customer because it gives the customer an additional layer of security for their environment and it gives us a very broad view of the threat landscape across a large geographic area and 20+ verticals ranging from construction to manufacturing to finance and entertainment. In most cases, there's a "low rumble" of generic threat traffic across the fleet and maybe a few stand-outs here and there. This week though, we have seen a significant spike in traffic from and to IP Addresses in Russia and China. Much of it has been from appliances like NVR / DVR devices,…
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17Feb 2022 by nathan

February 2022 News & Updates

CTC NEWS, Industry News, Monthly Newsletters, Tech news
Firewall as a Service - We are currently exploring an option to offer what we are calling a "Firewall as a Service" for commercial clients. This would effectively be a way to "rent" a managed firewall for a fixed monthly cost. There would be a nominal install cost as well as a monthly recurring cost to manage the firewall but no term agreement and the customer would not have to purchase the firewall. If you are interested in the Firewall as a Service program and / or would like information, let us know.Windows 11 is Here - Microsoft is wasting no time getting it's new flagship desktop operating system Windows 11 rolled out to (often) unsuspecting Windows 10 users. If you find yourself the recipient of an unexpected / involuntary…
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10Feb 2022 by nathan

AppRiver outage impacting email for some customers

Industry News, Tech news
We just received an email from AppRiver notifying us of an issue at one of the AppRiver Datacenters impacting email for some customers. I've posted a link to the status page from AppRiver below and we'll post any additional updates that we get that may not be on the status page on this post. 1234ET - At this time, it looks like mail flow has resumed and should be good to go. https://status.appriver.com/incidents/h7p8dq7gqx77
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