Broadtek

08/31/2026

Occasionally we like to remind everyone that scams are everywhere. Americans lost an estimated $148.2bn to online scams and crimes in 2025, up nearly 26% from the year prior. AI-enabled scams accounted for $6.3bn.

With AI being able to deep fake peoples voices it is more important than ever to watch for the 3 major red flags used by scammers:

1) Scammers push for you to act immediately. They make it important for things to happen 'right now'.

2) Scammers want Bitcoin, cash or gift cards. They avoid traceable funds.

3) Scammers don't want you to tell anyone what is happening. They'll want to control who you talk to about the situation.

With the possibility that believable AI might pretend to be a loved one in distress, setup an emergency word or phrase and share it with only your family members. Use that only if trying to confirm who you are communicating with.

08/16/2026

It's hard to think that your cloud data could be lost forever, but St Louis PBS station Channel 9 is looking at just that situation.

Nine PBS lost access to 50+ terabytes of archival material when cloud vendor Open Source Storage vanished. The station is suing to recover decades of regional history now held by Iron Mountain. A cautionary tale on backup strategy.

07/20/2026

Here's a little housekeeping tip. Save a copy of your BitLocker recovery keys. BitLocker encrypts your drive data and locks it to your system hardware. A copy should be saved in your Microsoft account information online, but you could also save a copy somewhere else. Last month a problematic Windows update caused some machines to prompt users to enter the recovery key during the boot process. If you didn't have access to that information, then the only solution was to wipe the machine and reinstall. You can find your information locally by typing Manage BitLocker in the windows search bar. From there you can print or save backup keys for each of your drives.

07/14/2026

Suffering data loss, whether it is family photos or critical business data, can be scary. Often that data can be recovered and that may just involve running basic system tools. Beyond that there are specialist businesses for the recovery process. Costs can vary from a few hundred to thousands of dollars for the same service. There are many independent vendors, without large advertising budgets, who can provide a much more reasonably priced service.

07/12/2026

It's not a new issue but the ClickFix exploit continues to cause problems. Many people wouldn't consider using the Windows R shortcut and pasting malicious code links, but many do because they think it is part of a legitimate way of proving they are a human or are trying to solve a technical issue. This Microsoft post from last year goes into the details. The TL;DR might be installing ThreatLocker on your systems. We can help.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/08/21/think-before-you-clickfix-analyzing-the-clickfix-social-engineering-technique/

07/06/2026

With the current memory and storage shortage making hardware purchases an expensive proposition, monitors are still a great value. Currently Dell Pro monitors start at just over $100 for the 24" model and around $140 for the 27". They come with DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA inputs as standard.

07/02/2026

Have you been offered higher connection speeds and reduced cost through your ISP or a new fiber provider? If you decide to take them up on one of those offers then please let your IT support company know. Often it isn't as simple as having a new router installed in your wiring closet. Changes in your public IP range may stop critical business systems from functioning correctly.

06/30/2026

As we move into the second half of the year be aware that Microsoft is rolling out price increases to the majority of their M365 offerings. Increases range from 5% to 30%+. Below is a published list of affected license subscriptions.

On December 4, Microsoft announced a global price and packaging update for select Microsoft 365 commercial suites and standalone components, including Enterprise, Business, Frontline, and Government commercial equivalents.

06/15/2026

Vendors are still pushing AI PC's and CoPilot Plus notebooks, but what does having a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit) actually do for the end user. You probably aren't using Large Language Models (LLMs) directly on your device, but there may be other local processes that benefit from that higher TOPS (trillion of operations per second) ratings often touted by manufacturers. Modern photo editing software can make use of AI resources, and it isn't limited to companies like Adobe. Many upscaling effects and noise reduction can be shifted to the NPU leaving the processor to do other tasks. The same type of processing can help background blur and effects in video apps via Windows Studio Effects. The new AI features in Office applications can also use NPU features. This may include generating original text. If there are particular applications that you use regularly it might be worth checking to see if they can use AI to help.

05/20/2026

Insecure browser extensions are one of the main causes of business email compromise (BEC) attacks. You should avoid adding browser extensions where possible, but you can also look them up on the LayerX Entensionpedia to see if they are flagged as particularly risky. (The link is posted in comments)