Copilot is My God?

We likely don’t realize how much AI plays a role in our daily lives. You know those annoying phone trees, the ones that don’t seem to ask the right questions for your problem or offer a good answer or access to a real human being? That’s AI at work. They drive me nuts, but what keeps me awake is who has access to my data?

Many of our customers are turning to Microsoft Copilot to access the power of AI, and if you’re thinking about doing it, here are a couple of things to consider.

As you’ll discover upfront, there’s a free version and a paid version. The main difference is that free Copilot is a basic AI assistant with web-grounded chat and limited image creation. The paid Copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 Copilot offer deeper integration with Microsoft apps, priority access to advanced models, and higher usage limits. I can use ChatGPT to create Excel formulas for my data, but it’s the paid version that accesses my data.

AI carries a number of risks, including data poisoning, adversarial attacks, and privacy leakage, which can compromise a model’s integrity and sensitive data. There’s also the potential for model theft and vulnerabilities in the supply chain and APIs. Let’s focus on risks related to data, privacy, and model integrity.

  • Privacy Leakage: AI models trained on sensitive data may inadvertently leak that information through their outputs. This includes data inversion and membership inference attacks, where attackers try to extract private information about the training data.
  • Model Stealing: Attackers can reverse-engineer or replicate an AI model by analyzing its outputs, which can be used for malicious purposes or to steal intellectual property.
  • Data Breaches: AI systems often require large amounts of data, making them attractive targets for data theft. A breach can expose sensitive personal, financial, or proprietary information.

Whether you use AI or not, Windows 11 and your computer play key roles in your security. All computers are not created equal. If you do a lot of work with Copilot, your computer may not cut it. You should have a computer with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of processing 40 TOPS – 40 trillion operations per second. Anything less than that will require your computer to offload data from your CPU and graphics card by sending it to the cloud.

Sending it to the cloud involves a security risk, no matter how small the risk may be, and that’s a breach opportunity. Sending data to the cloud also slows you down. If your computer can keep all your work local, it’s faster and more private.

Windows-based computer chips that run 40+ TOPS or more are the specialized Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in new “Copilot+ PCs,” which include processors from Intel’s Lunar Lake series and upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus chips. These are not standard CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which does not meet the requirement.

Computers capable of 40 TOPS start at around $600 to $700. More powerful and versatile models can cost more than $1,000, but prices could be much higher, depending on the NPU or if it uses a more expensive, high-performance GPU, which can add significant cost for graphics-intensive tasks. In addition, you likely will have licensing fees depending on what you’re doing and how many computers are doing the work.

We can help you assess your AI needs and sort through myriad options for Copilot licenses and the computers needed to accomplish the tasks you require. AI can require a large investment, which requires intensive investigation. Contact us by phone – 973-433-6676 – or email to set up an appointment to start the investigation process.

 

Fools and Their Money: A Seasonal Shopping Guide

“A fool and his money are soon parted” is a saying often attributed to Thomas Tusser, an English poet and farmer, who first wrote a version of it in his 1573 book Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie. If only he could have envisioned today’s internet. AI will test your ability this year to differentiate the fake from the real more than ever.

As we scour the internet for bargains, hard-to-find items, and the best possible shipping terms, charities are making their annual push for donations, including major online solicitation campaigns. Scammers of all sizes are also using all sorts of AI tools to get between you and the companies you want to buy from or donate to.

Succumbing to a scam doesn’t make you a fool; the scammers and their tools are really, really good. AI helps them create exceptionally good graphic and video deep fakes. It helps them replicate flawless logos and improve their grammar, spelling, and syntax, all of which used to be dead giveaways of a scam.

But it would be foolhardy not to raise your antennae and harden your common sense with renewed vigilance. The cardinal rule remains the same: If something looks too good to be true, something is likely wrong.

Let’s look at some things that should raise a red flag:

  • Links: Whether in an email or especially on a website popup, don’t click on a link from a person or entity you don’t know or can’t verify. It’s the quickest way to allow a bad actor to plant malicious code that can compromise your data and that of anyone in your contact list.
  • Emails from Businesses, Charities or People You Don’t Recognize: The sender’s name may look legitimate, but you can hover your mouse over the sender’s name and see the real email address. If you’re not sure about anything you see, you have two options:
    • Delete the email.
    • Open a new browser window and type in the name of the business or charity as you know it to be. You should be able to find a phone number to call to verify if it’s from a legitimate organization.
  • Unsolicited Text Messages: This is another form of phishing known as smishing. Treat them the same as an email.

Be careful of really good prices when shopping for all products and services. Prices that are too good to be true may be outright fraudulent or carry terms and conditions that are extremely unfavorable to you. Check closely to make sure a product or even an airline ticket or hotel room is not offered by a gray-market or third-party provider. Read the terms and conditions and look for authentic user reviews. Again, if something looks funny, it should raise a red flag.

No matter what you’re looking to do online, it’s more important than ever to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for all the websites you can. While a code sent to your computer or phone is better than nothing, more advanced forms of 2FA, such as authenticator apps or biometrics, rely more on information stored on a specific device, making them more secure.

If you think you may have been hacked, call us – 973-433-6676 – as soon as you possibly can to assess the breach and take steps to close up your security holes.

The Monitor Whisperer

If the eyes are the windows to one’s soul, then the monitor can be the window to your computer’s hardware issues. Here are two examples of what a monitor revealed, and how we found their revelations. It wasn’t as high-tech as you might think.

Our first instance involved a panicked client with a year-old Mac laptop that was hooked up to an external monitor. They said the computer was making a noise intermittently, and they were afraid it was the Mac’s version of a death rattle. We have to admit that the noise confounded us, too.

We did a search on the monitor make and model. Virtually all monitors have a single button that you need to push multiple times to make adjustments, and half the time, the user doesn’t know what adjustments are being made – or not being made. In this case, the monitor has a feedback feature that causes it to make a sound when it wakes up. That is scary until you learn about it; then it’s annoying.

We worked the button to shut off the monitor sounds.

In our second instance, a client thought they were hacked because they kept seeing a message in the corner of the screen. We remoted into their system but never saw that problem. Nor did we find any evidence that they had been hacked or compromised.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that when we look at your computer remotely, we don’t see your monitor screen. We see a representation that enables us to see what’s going on inside your computer. We didn’t see anything on our view, and the client couldn’t see any messages because they saw the same view we did.

Yet the problem persisted. So, we decided to do a FaceTime call, which enabled us to see what the client saw during their normal work. We saw that the monitor was throwing off alerts. We did some research and found the monitor was from 2006. The monitor owed the client nothing. We ordered two new monitors for the client and installed them. The client got better performance from their new monitors and screens with larger viewing areas.

The lesson learned from these experiences is that if we can’t remotely see the problem you reported, it’s likely a hardware issue. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us if you see something odd. We can confirm if it’s a hardware issue and help you solve it or replace it. And if it is a software issue, we can take care of that during the remote session.