ALCON DTS

By default, a Microsoft account will accept a login attempt from anywhere in the world.

Most attacks on Microsoft accounts come from overseas, from automated tools trying stolen passwords by the thousand. If your business only works in one or two countries, there's no reason to allow a login from anywhere else.

There's a setting in Microsoft 365 called Conditional Access that lets you block any login from outside the countries you operate in. Someone trying your password from the other side of the world is turned away, even if the password is right.

It won't stop everything, and a determined attacker can route through your country to get past it. But it blocks the flood of automated attempts from places you'll never deal with, and that's most of what you're up against.

You'll need the right Microsoft plan, and it's set up in the admin area, so ask your IT provider to turn it on and set the countries you work in.

When you log into a new tool with your Google account instead of making a fresh password, you're tying that tool to your Google login. Do it enough times and one account controls all of them.

It's quick, so most people click it without thinking.

The trouble starts if someone gets into that Google account. They get your email, and every app you logged into with it, in one go.

Google itself is a risk here too. If it ever suspends or locks your account, you can lose all those apps at once, and getting a Google account back is famously hard.

So for anything your business relies on, give it its own login and password, with two-factor turned on.

And put strong security on the Google account itself, since so much now runs through it.

Everyone's downloading AI tools at the moment, and scammers have caught on.

Say someone on your team wants to try a new AI app. They search for it, click the top result, and end up on a page that looks like the real company's site. They download the app. It's fake, and it steals every password saved on their computer.

The fake sites are hard to spot because they copy the real ones closely, and the link is often an ad shown above the real website in the results.

Security firms have reported a lot more of this over the past year.

Only download software by going to the company's real website yourself, not by clicking an ad or a search result. If a page asks you to install something and you're not sure it's real, don't. And it helps to agree as a team on which AI tools you use, so people aren't installing unknown ones to try them out.

That slow old laptop your employee is putting up with is costing you more than a new one would.

It's easy to treat a computer as something you only replace when it dies. As long as it still switches on, a new one feels like money you don't need to spend.

Every slow start-up in the morning, every wait for a file to open, every frozen call someone has to drop and rejoin is a couple of minutes gone.

It happens over and over, all day, to everyone stuck on an old machine. Add it up across a year and it's well past the price of a new laptop.

And that's before the frustration, or the fact that old machines stop getting security updates, which makes a slow computer a risky one too.

You don't have to replace everything at once. Just look at how old your team's computers are.

Around the three or four year mark is usually where a machine starts costing you more in lost time than a replacement would.

Ask your staff which computers drive them mad and they'll tell you straight away.

Your IT provider can also point out which ones are near the end of their supported life, since those tend to be both the slowest and the least safe.

Your customers are getting their answer before they ever reach your website.

Search Google for almost anything now and there's a good chance an AI-written answer sits at the top of the page. They already show up on a large share of searches, and that share keeps climbing.

When it's there, most people read it and never click through to a website at all.

That changes how people find you. Someone used to search a question your business could answer, land on your page, look around, and get in touch. Now the AI hands them the answer and they move on, and they never see you.

The businesses that get quoted inside those AI answers are getting more visits than before. So it's worth becoming the source it pulls from.

Start with your website. Make sure it answers the questions your customers ask, in plain words rather than marketing waffle, because that's what the AI picks up.

Keep your Google Business Profile filled out and correct.

And get your name onto other respected sites in your field. The more solid places that mention you, the more the AI leans on you.

If your visitors from search have been dropping and you couldn't work out why, this is a big part of it.

Microsoft has installed Copilot on business computers automatically.

It's worth getting your files in order before you use it.

Copilot can see any file the person using it can already open.

In most businesses, that's a lot more than it should be.

Files get shared with "everyone" for convenience. Folders get opened up for a project and never closed again. It piles up over the years, and no one notices, because no one goes looking through it all.

Once Copilot is in the mix, people don't have to go looking. They ask a question, and it answers using anything it's allowed to see, including files that were left open to the whole company by mistake.

So before you let the team use it, get someone to check your file permissions, starting with HR and finance. People should only be able to see what they need to.

If you open an email attachment that looks like an image and it asks you to log in, close it.

There's a phishing trick going around this year that hides inside picture files, and it gets past the filters most businesses rely on.

It uses a file type called SVG. It's an image format, but unlike a normal photo, it can carry code inside it.

Someone double-clicks the attachment expecting a picture. Instead it opens in their browser, runs, and sends them to a fake Microsoft login page built for their exact email.

The email system lets it through because, as far as it can tell, it's just an image. Researchers flagged a wave of these in early June.

A picture should never send you to a login screen. So if you open an attachment and it asks for your password, don't type it in.

And be careful with any image you weren't expecting, especially one ending in .svg.

People almost never send those on purpose.

Ask your IT provider to block SVG attachments. Hardly any business needs to receive them, so blocking them costs you nothing.

Whoever controls your domain name controls your whole business.

Your domain is the address behind your website and your email. It sits in an account at whatever company you registered it with, like GoDaddy.

Anyone who can log into that account can point your website and email wherever they like.

At a lot of small businesses, nobody knows who has that login. It was set up years ago by a web guy who's long gone, or it's under one staff member's personal email with a password that hasn't changed since.

If someone gets into that account, they don't need to hack anything else.

They can send your website visitors to a fake page that still shows your real address.

They can take over your email and reset the passwords on everything tied to it.

They can send your clients an invoice from your real address, and your clients will pay it, because it came from you.

So go and check who controls the account, whether it's got two-factor login switched on, and whether the domain lock is turned on, which stops anyone moving your domain elsewhere.

While you're in there, set it to auto-renew so it can't expire.

If you deleted a OneDrive file recently and went looking for it in your Recycle Bin… surprise, it's not there.

Starting in May 2026, files deleted from OneDrive or SharePoint in the cloud no longer appear in your local Recycle Bin or Trash.

They are removed directly from your device and can only be recovered from the OneDrive or SharePoint web‑based recycle bin.

1. Go to onedrive.com or your SharePoint site

2. Click "Recycle bin" in the left menu

3. Right-click the file and select "Restore"

You typically have 30 days before files move to the second‑stage recycle bin (which most people don’t know about), and up to 93 more days there, depending on your organization’s settings.

After about 123 days, they’re gone for good.

If you signed up for AI tools over the past 18 months and haven't reviewed them since, you're probably wasting money.

A March 2026 audit of 102 small businesses found that 87% had significant waste in their AI subscriptions, with a median of $18,000 wasted per year.

Most owners go through the same pattern. You signed up for ChatGPT, then Claude, then a transcription tool, then a meeting note-taker, then a writing assistant. Most of these tools now do what the others do.

Three signs your AI stack needs an audit:
▶️ You're paying for two tools that do the same thing
▶️ Your team stopped using a subscription you're still paying for
▶️ You can't quickly explain the ROI of each tool

While you're at it, check the security too:
✅ Make sure every tool is on a business plan with a "Do Not Train" clause. Consumer plans feed your data into the model.
✅ Remove access for ex-employees. AI tools get forgotten during offboarding.
✅ Check what's connected to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. AI tools often have access to your email and files you never noticed.