Here is a pattern we have run into repeatedly over the past few months while cleaning up compromised web servers. The site is clearly hacked — injected redirects, spam pages, an administrator account nobody created. It gets cleaned. Every malware scan comes back with no threats found. A commercial engine…

You've got a Windows machine joined to Microsoft Entra ID (what used to be called Azure AD), and you need a particular cloud account to be a local administrator on that PC — to install software, run elevated tools, or just support the user. On a traditional domain you'd drop…

Here's a scenario we've run into more than once lately while cleaning up compromised Linux web servers: the site is clearly hacked — spam pages, redirects, mail being sent — but every malware scan of the .php files comes back clean. The admin greps the whole site for PHP shells,…

My phone started doing something maddening: every time I dropped it on the wireless charger, a browser popped open to an ad. No app I could point to. Nothing obvious in my app drawer. Just… ads, on cue, whenever it charged. Here's exactly how I hunted it down and removed…

When a Windows 11 machine blue-screens, the question on everyone’s mind is the same: what caused it? The stop code on the blue screen is rarely enough to tell you. SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE — those are symptoms, not causes. The actual answer is sitting on the disk in a file…

If you have set up DKIM for a Microsoft 365 domain recently, you may have hit a frustrating snag: you publish both CNAME records exactly as Microsoft tells you to, you wait for propagation, and then selector1 resolves perfectly — but selector2 stubbornly returns NXDOMAIN. Enabling DKIM in the Defender…

TL;DR. Emailing a spreadsheet of client data, a signed contract, or a PDF with a Social Security number on it is one of the most common ways small businesses leak protected information. There is a much better answer baked into Microsoft 365: OneDrive secure sharing. With a few clicks you…

TL;DR. Most people use Microsoft Teams as a glorified instant-messenger and miss the 80% of it that makes the upgrade worthwhile. Teams is really a shared workspace: chat plus files plus tasks plus a calendar plus meetings, all wired into the same group of people, with everything backed by SharePoint…

TL;DR. SharePoint Online can replace the aging file server in the back closet — access from anywhere without VPN, automatic versioning, real backup, native co-authoring in Word and Excel — but only if you actually design the sites. The biggest mistake we see is treating SharePoint like a single big…

TL;DR. QR-code phishing — nicknamed quishing — jumped roughly 146% in the first quarter of 2026 according to Microsoft, which now sees billions of phishing emails containing QR codes per quarter. Attackers love QR codes because the codes hide the destination URL, sail through email filters as a harmless image,…

TL;DR. OneDrive only syncs files that live inside its own folder. If you have project data, scanned documents, archives, or QuickBooks files in D:\, C:\Customers, or anywhere else, OneDrive ignores them by default — and they are not backed up. The fix is a one-line Windows command that creates a…

TL;DR. Email started in the 1980s as a protocol that took the sender at their word. Forty years later we have three layered standards — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — that let receiving servers (and you) verify whether a message really came from the domain it claims. As of 2024…

TL;DR. A growing share of the phishing email landing in your users’ inboxes is not spoofed. It is being sent from a real, fully-authenticated Microsoft 365 mailbox — usually a vendor or partner whose account was hijacked — and it passes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with a perfect score. Authentication…

TL;DR. The largest US tech companies are spending more than half a trillion dollars on AI data centers in 2026. Texas and Virginia lead the count, but two of the most consequential projects for our region are much closer to home: Microsoft announced in April 2026 that it intends to…

TL;DR. Dell, like several other major vendors, is consolidating its partner ecosystem and asking many smaller resellers to buy through authorized distributors (TD Synnex, Ingram Micro) instead of direct from Dell. We are a Dell Partner, we have received the notices, and we are already lining up the distribution relationships…

TL;DR. SSDs — both the consumer kind in workstations and the enterprise kind in servers — are noticeably more expensive than they were a year ago, and a lot of capacities are on multi-month back-order. Two forces are colliding: hyperscaler AI data centers are buying every NAND chip they can…

In the registry, navigate to: HKCU \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer Set DisablePersonalDirChange = 0

This post first ran in 2014. Twelve years later, “Microsoft just called about a problem with your computer” is bigger than ever — just dressed up better. Below is what is current as of 2026, written for the family member or co-worker most likely to get one of these calls.…