Look how official this looks. What A SCAM!

This is a continuation of the scam that we have been warning you about! The problem is that once you are infected it is too late to do anything about it.

You have two choices. Pay up or revert to your backups. What! No Backups! Well this is something that you need to think about. The encryption locks away your data so that you need to access some kind of clean separate backup that is incremental so that you can roll back to a clean drive.

If you are not already setup to do this, then you need to talk to us to give you a solution to provide this kind of protection.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/cryptolocker-look-alike-searches-for-and-encrypts-pc-game-files/

Beware the PUP (potentially unwanted programs)

Top download portals to avoid

Michael sent this out to us internally but it is something that has bothered me for quite awhile so I thought I would get it out there so you would be able to be aware. I use downloads.com all of the time for some of the programs that I want to use but you have to watch what else is being asked of you. They are making money from your clicks and installs of products that you never really wanted. Beware!

Interesting read about how commonly used download portals (ex: download.com, tucows, etc...) bundle crap that you don't need. I think this is a really nice read and we should post it to the Facebook site. Not only does it tell you which sites bundle stuff, it also gives instruction on how to carefully read what you're clicking on and avoiding getting the bundled stuff in the first place as well.

http://blog.emsisoft.com/2015/03/11/mind-the-pup-top-download-portals-to-avoid/

Tech Republic reported on the next release of Office (2016)

Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview has a number of valuable new features  By Tony Bradley March 18, 2015

Tony discusses that many of the new features revolve around security and data loss protection (DLP). Installation and feature updates are going to be more fluid and more frequent. Activation of the product is also supposed to be simplified. There will be an Office 365 admin portal to manage device activations for your users.

Outlook should have its stability improved over unreliable networks to help improve performance. Hopefully this will help to speed up delivery of messages. Other than these under the hood changes the UI is going to remain essentially the same so that should be a good thing for your users. There are always some cries of anguish when then UI is changed substantially. I don’t think many of us like change that much.