The Dangers of Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Messages

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Trust Us: Your Auto-Reply Message Can Get You Into Trouble

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By Andy O'Donnell as written on netsecurity.about.com
So, you're headed off on a business trip. You've got your plane tickets, hotel reservations, and everything is good to go. Only one thing left to do, it's time to set your Outlook Out-of-Office Auto-Reply message so that clients or coworkers e-mailing you will know how to contact you while you're away, or will know who they can contact during your absence.
Seems like the responsible thing to do, right? Wrong! Out-of-Office Auto-replies can be a huge security risk.
Out-of-Office replies can potentially reveal a huge amount of sensitive data about you to anyone who happens to e-mail you while you're away.
Here's an Example of a Common Out-of-office Reply:
"I will be out of the office at the XYZ conference in Burlington Vermont during the week of June 1-7. If you need any help with invoice-related issues during this time, please contact my supervisor, Joe Somebody at 555-1212. If you need to reach me during my absence you can reach me on my cell at 555-1011.
While the message above is helpful, it may also be harmful because, in a couple of short sentences, the person in the e-mail above revealed some incredibly useful information about himself. This information could be used by criminals for social engineering attacks.
The example out-of-office reply above provides an attacker with:
Current Location Information
Revealing your location aids attackers in knowing where you are and where you aren't. If you say you're in Vermont, then they know that you aren't at your home in Virginia. This would be a great time to rob you. If you said you were at the XYZ conference (as Bill did), then they know where to look for you. They also know that you're not in your office and that they might be able to talk their way into your office saying something like:
"Bill told me to pick up the XYZ report. He said it was on his desk. Do you mind if I pop in his office and grab it." A busy secretary might just let a stranger into Bill's office if the story seems plausible.
Contact information
The contact information that Bill revealed in his out-of-office reply may help scammers piece together elements needed for identity theft. They now have his e-mail address, his work and cell numbers, and his supervisor's contact info as well.
When someone sends Bill a message while his auto-reply is turned on, his e-mail server will send the auto-reply back to them, which in-effect confirms Bill's e-mail address as a valid working address. E-mail Spammers love getting confirmation that their spam reached a real live target. Bill's address will likely now be added to other spam lists as a confirmed hit.
Place of employment, job title, line of work, and chain of command
Your signature block often provides your job title, the name of the company you work for (which also reveals what type of work you do), your e-mail, and your phone and fax numbers. If you added "while I'm out please contact my supervisor, Joe Somebody" then you just revealed your reporting structure and your chain of command as well.
Social engineers could use this information for impersonation attack scenarios. For instance, they could call your company's HR department pretending to be your boss and say "This is Joe Somebody. Bill Smith is off on a trip and I need his Employee ID and Social Security Number so I can correct his company tax forms."
Some Out-of-Office message setups allow you to restrict the reply so that it only goes to members of your host e-mail domain, but most people have clients and customers outside of the hosting domain so this feature won't help them.
How can you create a safer out-of-office auto-reply message?
1. Be intentionally vague
Instead of saying that you will be somewhere else, say that you will be "unavailable". Unavailable could mean you are still in town or in the office taking a training class. It helps keep the bad guys from knowing where you really are.
2. Don't provide contact info
Don't give out phone numbers or e-mails. Tell them that you will be monitoring your e-mail account should they need to contact you.
3. Leave out all personal information and remove your signature block
Remember that complete strangers and possibly scammers and spammers may see your auto-reply. If you wouldn't normally give this info to strangers, don't put it in your auto-reply.
Just a note to my readers, I will be in Disney World all next week, but you can reach me by carrier pigeon (just kidding about the Disney World part).

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Office 365 news at WPC 2016

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Office 365 news at WPC 2016

By Kirk Koenigsbauer as written on blogs.office.com
Today, I had the privilege of taking the stage in Toronto for our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) to talk about Office 365 momentum and the opportunity we have together with our partners. With their help, after five years in market, Office 365 is now empowering over 70 million people each month in companies of all sizes. Together, Microsoft and our partners can help our mutual customers empower their employees through digital transformation.

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Facebook likes Office 365
Today, we announced that Facebook has chosen Office 365. CIO Tim Campos joined me on stage at WPC to outline Facebook’s confidence in Office 365 as the best tool to empower their 13,000 employees to accomplish as much as they possibly can each day. This supports Facebook’s ongoing mission to make the world more open and connected for their user base of over one billion people. Facebook joins Cushman and Wakefield, Atkins and countless other organizations relying on Office 365 and its intelligent, secure services to enable a digital workplace.
All of this momentum would not be possible without the help of our partners, who play an essential role in empowering organizations around the world by delivering the latest enterprise value in Office 365. This is one reason why we continue to invest in their success and build great offerings.
Skype for Business provides more opportunity for partner success
Today, we introduced a new set of resources to help partners unlock the opportunity around Office 365, the Skype Operations Framework (SOF)—an end-to-end planning, deployment and operations methodology for Skype for Business. SOF provides partners a comprehensive guide and toolset for implementing and managing a reliable, cost-effective communications service with Skype in the cloud. It can help partners drive operational excellence and high quality deployments. Partners like Modality are already using this framework to expand their Skype for Business offerings beyond on-premises deployments to managed services.
We also are continuing to expand the global footprint of Skype for Business PSTN services. PSTN Conferencing is now available to customers in 92 countries including Venezuela, Uruguay, Vietnam and Kenya added this month. In addition, PSTN Calling is now available in both the UK and U.S., providing inbound and outbound calling, voicemail, phone numbers and calling plans.
Lastly, we’re excited to announce that Office 365 customers will be getting a preview of automatic transcription and translation in Skype Meeting Broadcast by the end of 2016. Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you produce, host and broadcast meetings to large online audiences. These new services will provide live closed captioning of presentations and allow viewers to choose translation into their preferred language from a list of supported languages.

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Office recognized by AIG for security and compliance strength
One of the reasons so many customers have chosen Office 365 is that we’re built on a platform of trust. In light of our industry-leading security and compliance capabilities, Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud are being recognized by AIG, which will now include a Microsoft Cloud endorsement with its CyberEdge insurance policy. Microsoft is the first cloud vendor to achieve this status with AIG. This endorsement allows new or renewing AIG CyberEdge customers using Microsoft Azure, Office 365 or Dynamics 365 to have access to expanded business interruption coverage as part of their policy terms.
“We’ve worked closely with Microsoft to assess the security and compliance capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud,” said Tracie Grella, global head of Cyber Risk at AIG. “We’re impressed and excited to offer this unique endorsement to our joint customers.”
Office 365 Education offerings now available in CSP
We are pleased to announce that Office 365 Education plans are now available in the Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP), adding yet another Office 365 offering that partners can bundle with their own services, while continuing to own the customer relationship end-to-end.
Let’s achieve more together!
Now is a better time than ever for partners to grow their businesses with Office 365. Partners can win new customers and add value by building practices, delivering services and bundling solutions around our new advanced services. Partners working with Microsoft have a $120 billion managed services and solutions opportunity over three years. Office 365 is core to our ambition of reinventing productivity. This would not be possible without our partners and their dedication to our platform. We appreciate your partnership and thanks for a great WPC!

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Excel 2016 Quick Start Guide

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Excel 2016 Quick Start Guide

New to Excel 2016 or upgrading from a previous version? Use this guide to learn the basics! Helpful tips and tricks including:

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1. Creating workbooks
2. Finding files
3. Discovering contextual tools
4. Inserting functions and building formulas
5. Sharing your workbooks
And more!
After becoming a pro, see what Managed Solution and other Microsoft products can do for your company.

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Pokémon Go has an estimated 7.5M U.S. downloads, $1.6M in daily revenue

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Pokémon Go has an estimated 7.5M U.S. downloads, $1.6M in daily revenue

By Darrell Etherington as written on TechCrunch.com

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Pokémon Go is off to a big start in the U.S., but just how big? The company hasn’t yet revealed any official numbers, but we have estimates to provide an idea of the scope of downloads and revenue the mobile game is generating.
App analytics company SensorTower used its predictive model of the App Store and Google Play, which takes hundreds of thousands of data points from its partners to generate an estimate of the download numbers Pokémon Go is seeing: it’s been downloaded a total of around 7.5 million times in the U.S. From Google Play and the iOS App Store, according to their numbers.
In terms of earning power, the game is making around $1.6 million per day, according to SensorTower, and that revenue estimate is limited to iOS only.
To put that into context, Clash Royal (which is among the biggest recent hits in mobile gaming) is currently estimated to be making around $350,000 per day on iOS, according to SensorTower’s data. Obviously, there’s going to be some drop-off when it comes to daily spend as the hype wears out, but Pokémon has a number of benefits that could add to its stickiness, including a beloved IP and ample avenues to expand its content offerings in order to keep users coming back.
Consider, for instance, that Pokémon Go currently only includes the original stable of 150 Pokémon; there are still another 570 remaining as of the release of Pokémon X/Y (and there are more on the horizon with the next installment’s release in Pokémon Sun and Moon).
Meanwhile, SimilarWeb covered other interesting comparisons for the game so far, including a revelation that it already leapfrogged Tinder in installs on Android in U.S. Installs, and that it already eclipses various other social media apps in active use time on devices.

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Nintendo’s other recent mobile title had only 1.58 million downloads in its initial five days on iPhone and Android, which pales in comparison. That’s the power of Pokémon.

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Managed Solution has been announced the Microsoft 2016 US SMB Champions Club SMB Marketer of the Year

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Managed Solution has been announced the Microsoft 2016 US SMB Champions Club SMB Marketer of the Year

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SAN DIEGO, CA - July 11, 2016 - Microsoft Corp. recognized award winners and finalists from around the world today at the 2016 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference taking place in Toronto, Canada. Managed Solution, a highly honored and tenured managed services company and pioneer in managed, utility-based cloud computing, has been announced the Microsoft 2016 US SMB Champions Club SMB Marketer of the Year, selected from more than 2,500 nominations collected from 119 different countries worldwide based on their commitment to customers, their solution’s impact on the market and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.
"We are extremely honored to be recognized for our originality and success not only in marketing but also the ability of our sales team to take the ball and run with it, resulting in some great numbers this year for Managed Solution", says Jackie Wiener, Vice President of Marketing at Managed Solution.
“The 2016 Partner of the Year Award winners and finalists represent the most innovative and transformative work being done across our partner community,” said Gavriella Schuster, general manager, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft. “It is important to recognize and celebrate the value and opportunity these solutions create for our mutual customers. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners and finalists on this tremendous achievement.”
The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year.

About Managed Solution

Managed Solution is the premier provider of outsourced IT support and managed services for small to large size businesses. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California. Managed Solution continues to deliver award-winning services paired with leading business technologies to assist clients in running their business efficiently.

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