Managed Service – Casserly Consulting

Tip of the Week: Avoiding Scams

Uh oh. One of your employees sat down at their workstation and was presented with a pop-up telling them that Microsoft has detected a fatal issue with their workstation, and if they don’t let someone remote in to fix it, all of their data will be lost. This could be a serious problem… especially if your employee falls for this scam and lets in a threat.

Tech support scams are not an uncommon thing, blending social engineering and phishing together to deliver the desired result to a scammer. For our tip, we’ll discuss how to identify and avoid these scams and deprive a scammer of that result.

A Global Problem
Make no mistake, these scams are an issue all around the world. While the impact is felt the greatest in the United States, China, and India, scammers clearly don’t discriminate by region.

However, there’s another layer to the issue of tech support scams.

There is an intense level of competition in India for employment opportunities, especially among the generation who should now be entering the workforce. For some reference as to how intense this competition is, 2016 saw a state-owned bank receive over one and a half million applications for just 1,500 open positions. This makes it not uncommon for many job applicants to be grossly overqualified for the position they are seeking, recipients of a master’s degree in business administration often applying to be a street sweeper. Naturally, this provides ample motivation for the populace to take any job that presents itself – even if it is at the expense of another.

Many call centers in India will take full, unabashed advantage of this, hiring young job-seekers through a convoluted and secretive process – sometimes not even informing the applicant who they are actually working for. This process can also cost the applicant a not-insignificant sum, as they are often charged for these interviews and trainings. Once the training is complete, an applicant leaves with a start date.

However, these jobs are often not what is expected. Instead of working in customer service, these youths are tasked with initiating a scam. They will call a target, deliver their “pitch,” and transfer the primed caller to a senior scammer who seals the deal. However, despite abysmal pay for being involved in these scams and the emotional burden placed on them by interacting with their often-helpless and terrified targets, many of these scammers find that scams are, again, one of the few effective ways to make money. As a result, many of these young scammers – effectively exploited themselves – end up embracing their role, working to get as big a piece of the pie as possible.

Thwarting These Attempts
Of course, while those on the other end of the line may not be in a great position themselves, you want to make sure that their efforts to scam you are ultimately wasted. To accomplish this outcome, it is important to remember a few key warning signs.

Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You – The first thing to remember is that, if a Microsoft representative suddenly calls you without warning, they probably aren’t actually with Microsoft. You should even take your caller ID with a grain of salt, as that can be spoofed to look official enough to trust.
Weak Link in the Chain – Links are another favorite weapon of scammers, as they can be shared in an email to direct a user to a website filled with fake warning pop-ups. Avoid clicking on these links, and if you are presented with an alert screen, restart your computer. Scammers will also work to ensure that they reach the top results of search engines through sponsored ads to attract those legitimately looking for help. These links should be avoided as well. Google has made serious efforts to not allow scammers to run Remote IT Support ads, but it hasn’t stopped everything yet.
Remain in Control – Unless you are absolutely sure that a third party is trustworthy, never give up control of your computer. Otherwise, you could hand precious data over to a scammer or otherwise land yourself in hot water.

The Better Method
Of course, if you enlist the services of COMPANYNAME, a fair amount of these points become moot, as you will have access to an experienced team of trustworthy IT professionals who have your business’ interests at heart. For more information, give us a call at PHONENUMBER.

Have you ever encountered a scam like this before? Tell us about it in the comments!

Why It’s Great that Managed Services are Managed

One of the key benefits of managed IT services is right in the title. It’s managed, meaning that you don’t have to worry about maintaining or configuring your systems. Many small businesses see these kinds of advertisements out in the world but don’t necessarily understand what services are being marketed to them. We’ll take a deep dive into what you can expect from “managed” services for your organization.

Defining Managed Services
Managed services are any services your organization takes advantage of that aren’t managed directly by your company. Perhaps the best example is comparing it to the way the average consumer uses their email. Let’s say you use Gmail as your preferred email service for personal use. Do you manage the mail server running Gmail? Probably not, making the average Gmail user a patron of managed services. If you think about it in this sense, any service that your organization doesn’t manage on its own could be considered a managed service.

In the case of managed IT services, the term “managed” means anything that’s not hosted on your infrastructure or maintained by your on-site employees. This can be anything from cloud-based data storage and web applications to entirely hosted hardware infrastructures that are accessed virtually through the cloud. If you can think it, you can build it–the technology infrastructure of your dreams, without all of the frustration of managing and maintaining it on your own.

The rise of managed IT services has its roots in break-fix IT, where businesses would take their technology to a specialist in order to get issues resolved. This approach meant that they didn’t need employees to maintain the technology on-site, but it also came at a steep cost. Break-fix IT companies would take advantage of businesses that came to them in this fashion, taking care of immediate problems without taking measures for the long term. This meant that businesses would often experience even more issues without addressing the overarching problem, leading to wasted dollars and wasted time.

Now, back to the “managed” part. When a business isn’t managing its own IT, they don’t have to worry about these issues because they are being addressed by a company that A.) Knows how to take care of technology, B.) Takes proactive measures to ensure issues don’t reoccur, and most important of all, C.) Can save your business precious time and resources that can be better spent on other tasks. Imagine having enough time to invest in new outreach initiatives for potential clients, or finally having enough in your budget to not only invest in new technology solutions but implement great ways to increase your bottom line.

COMPANYNAME specializes in providing small businesses with the managed services they need to stay competitive with larger organizations. Managed services often come at a better price point than hiring an entire internal IT department, making it an attractive option for both businesses that don’t have resources to maintain an on-site infrastructure and those that have enough of a staff to manage one, but not enough to maintain it properly. We can either supplement your current help or function entirely as an outsourced IT provider. All you have to do is reach out and ask what we can do for your business.

To learn more about the managed IT business model, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.