Archive for July 18, 2025

HP’s WXP Helps Canadian Companies Reimagine Hybrid Work

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 18, 2025 by itnerd

As hybrid work becomes the norm in Canada, a growing tech disconnect is fueling employee frustration and burnout. With an explosion of new devices and digital tools, two-thirds of employees report they regularly struggle with workplace tech yet only half feel adequately supported by their IT teams.

This gap is taking a toll on productivity and morale, not just for frontline staff but also for the IT professionals tasked with holding it all together. As Canadian businesses push to modernize, the message is clear: improving the digital employee experience is no longer optional.

HP’s Workforce Experience Platform (WXP) is more than just IT support, it’s a strategic solution that streamlines workflows, resolves issues before they surface, and helps teams thrive in a complex, always-on world.

Some key ways WXP helps IT and security teams reshape the modern workplace:

  • AI Sentiment Analysis: WXP now includes AI capabilities to assess and improve employee experience by analyzing sentiment data, allowing IT teams to identify and address issues before they impact productivity.
  • Smarter Insights, Less Guesswork: Integration with Vyopta allows businesses to monitor and optimize collaboration environments with integrated insights into video and telephone endpoints, enhancing user satisfaction and performance.
  • Fleet Explorer: A new AI-powered tool that uses natural language processing to help IT managers quickly access fleet data. Instead of sifting through reports, they can ask questions like “Which devices had the highest memory over-utilization in the past 30 days?” and get instant insights—enabling faster issue resolution before employee performance is affected.

To learn more about the HP Workforce Experience Platform, visit here.

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Slack announces new AI and search capabilities

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 18, 2025 by itnerd

Slack has released new AI and search capabilities that deeply integrate AI across everything that makes up the Slack experience.

Built to harness institutional knowledge and conversational data that teams create daily, the new capabilities will also increase the user experience by cutting down the need to dig through threads, jump between apps, or rewrite content from scratch.

New features:

  • AI writing assistance in canvas built directly into Slack canvas that allows users to draft project briefs, generate action items, refine content, and more with natural language prompts. 
  • AI message explanations by hovering over any message to get instant, in-context explanations of unfamiliar concepts, terminology, or technical details. 
  • AI action items enable users to stay on top of highest-priority tasks. AI will identify what’s most important and only notify users when it provides a meaningful update or adds more value than current activity.
  • AI profile summaries give users quick context on another user’s role and recent contributions. This means teams can align faster and minimise unnecessary back-and-forth communication.

Slack is also announcing the general availability of:

  • Translations to let teammates read and contribute in their preferred language. When users come across a message in a different language, they’ll see a button they can use to translate that message into any language they’d like.
  • Enterprise search, which surfaces information across connected apps, data, and conversations from a single search bar. Teams can connect to systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Confluence, Box, and more, essentially making the Slack search bar the unified interface for all of the team’s structured and unstructured data.

More details can be found here: AI That Actually Works for You | Slack

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Here’s A New One For Me…. A Phishing Email That Uses QR Codes

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 18, 2025 by itnerd

I get phishing emails all the time. Such as my email address is about to be “deactivated” if I don’t re-authenticate to my server. Or I need to authenticate to my server to “keep my same password”. Since I run my own email server, I find these phishing attempts to be downright hysterical because there’s zero chance that they will work on me. But today I got this phishing attempt which is a bit more “interesting”, I got this email this morning:

Sidebar: Seeing as I am a company of two. The two being my wife and I, it’s funny that the threat actors think that we have an HR department. But I guess that a threat actor has to start someplace to try and phish you.

Now I obscured the QR code as I don’t want anyone scanning it. But in lieu of an attachment with a payload that executes on a target’s computer, or a link that the target clicks on, I got a QR code. Likely because it can evade spam filters and other security software or devices.

If you scan the QR code, which should be clear you should not scan the QR code if you get an email like this, it will take you to a phishing page that you are meant to enter your email address and your email password. This fits some other reports of this type of phishing that I have heard about. Here’s a quick list that I’ve posted on this blog in the past:

Fortra Discovers Sophisticated QR Code Phishing Campaign That Targets Office 365 Users

Abnormal Security Announces Enhanced Capabilities to Detect QR Code Attacks

C-Suite Receives 42x More QR Code Attacks Than Average Employee: Abnormal Security

New Report to Reveal QR Code Phishing Scams: Quishing You a Happy Holiday Season

INKY Discusses How Threat Actors Are Using QR Codes To Harvest Credentials

So what this means is that attacks like this one are becoming increasingly pervasive. Thus this is another attack vector that you need to be aware of to keep you and your organization safe.

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Researchers share popular US states used in passwords

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 18, 2025 by itnerd

The Cybernews’ research team examined billions of passwords from over 200 cybersecurity incidents, revealing that individuals frequently select US states as their passwords. Carolina, Dakota, and Texas are the most popular and appear in thousands, even millions, of analyzed passwords, making them not a reliable choice for account security.

Being proud of your state makes you more likely to get hacked 

Even though everything is bigger in Texas, it is not the biggest and best choice for a password. And even though Texas appeared in passwords around 1M times, it only came out third on the list. Surprisingly, even California, the most populated state in the US, only ranked 11th on the wordlist (p. 18), with 556.9K uses. 

Carolina (1.9M) and Dakota (1.2M) are the two most popular US states that will not keep hackers away. At least one of these states will appear once around every 6K passwords. Interestingly, the number of times Alaska is mentioned in passwords is almost the same as that of its residents. 

The ten most popular states used in passwords

You can find the ten most popular states and how often they were named in passwords here: 

  1. Carolina — 1,921,229 
  2. Dakota — 1,171,849 
  3. Texas — 1,067,634 
  4. NewYork — 968,905 
  5. Florida — 879,400 
  6. Montana — 795,246
  7. Maine — 783,380
  8. Georgia — 710,455
  9. Alaska — 674,948
  10. Hawaii — 589,977

Network Assured released a report listing the 10 U.S. states with the most data breaches, both historically and in 2022. The data shows that Texas was the third-worst state for data breaches, with 581 reported incidents, despite having the highest state cybersecurity budget at $800 million. Not only does Texas rank third overall in the report, but it also ranked high in Cybernews research, being the third most mentioned state in passwords. These statistics suggest that investing heavily in cybersecurity alone may not solve issues caused by poor human practices unless resources are used effectively. 

However, some states appeared in passwords the least number of times. States and combinations like “NorthDakota,” “SouthDakota,” “NewHampshire,” “SouthCarolina,” “WestVirginia,” “Massachusetts,” “RhodeIsland,” “Pennsylvania,” “NorthCarolina,” and “NewMexico” were mentioned only about 3K times each.

The combinations mentioned above, especially those containing two words, are safer than the most popular states, but aren’t the safest option. Even though they are longer than eight characters and include both lower-case and upper-case letters, passwords should also incorporate numbers and special characters to reduce the risk of being leaked. Tools like the Password leak checker are available to check if a password has been compromised. 

To read the complete research, please click here. 

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