Tuesday, June 3rd. Four stories today: ransomware hitting small manufacturers through a door that should have been nailed shut years ago, a printer bug fix with a catch, the FTC forcing subscription cancellations to be as easy as sign-ups, and AI pricing keeps falling even though nobody’s making money yet.
Or watch on YouTube.
Fog Ransomware Is Actively Hitting Small Manufacturers Right Now
The FBI’s cyber division dropped a flash alert — not a “hey, heads up someday” advisory, an active warning — that a ransomware group called Fog is out there right now scanning for small manufacturers and industrial service companies with exposed RDP ports. Remote Desktop Protocol. Port 3389. The one that lets you log into your server from home like you’re sitting in front of it.
In May alone, at least 47 small manufacturers were successfully hit. Not probed. Not almost-hit. Compromised. Data stolen, encrypted, ransomed. The usual playbook, except the targets have shifted. Fog has made a deliberate pivot toward sub-100-employee shops because — and I want you to really hear this — they’ve figured out that smaller companies have less IT oversight. They are choosing you on purpose because they think you’re easier.
I saw one of the worst ransomware situations of my career at a company that had an open RDP port. The bad guys got in, stole everything, then encrypted it so the business couldn’t function. It would have put that company completely out of business. The only thing that saved them was their backups — and even then, the ransomware was actively encrypting the backup chain while we were on the phone. They were one more backup rotation away from losing everything. We grabbed the last clean copy, wiped the machine, restored, and got them back. That close.
So what do you do if you’re not sure whether you’re exposed? Call your IT person and ask one specific question: is port 3389 open on my firewall? If the answer is yes, that needs to change today. There are, as I said on air, 1.2 trillion other ways to get remote access to your systems that don’t involve hanging a door open on the public internet. A proper VPN. A zero-trust remote access tool. Anything. The fact that 47 manufacturers got hit in a single month through a vulnerability that the industry has been screaming about for decades is, frankly, flabbergasting.
If you’re in any kind of defense-related manufacturing, this is even more urgent. Stolen data doesn’t just cost you the ransom — it costs you the contract, the clearance, and potentially a lot more.
Patch Tuesday Fixed the Printer Bug — Mostly
Microsoft pushed patches today targeting the WSD bug. Web Services for Devices — that’s the protocol that makes adding a network printer feel almost like it isn’t a nightmare. The bug broke it for roughly 12% of all Windows deployments. That’s not a fringe issue. That’s a lot of offices staring at a printer that used to work and now doesn’t, with no obvious reason why.
The patch is out. Go run Windows Update. But — and there is always a but with Microsoft printer stuff — some printers are going to need a manual registry edit on top of the patch to fully come back. That’s not something most people should be poking around in on their own. If you apply the patch and the printer still isn’t showing up correctly, that’s probably why, and that’s when you call someone.
I’ll also say this: “easy to add a printer” is an oxymoron on the level of military intelligence. Printers have always been the most reliably unreliable piece of hardware in any office. Microsoft introducing a bug that makes them harder to add is a special kind of achievement. But the patch is here, so let’s move on.
The FTC’s Click-to-Cancel Rule Is Enforceable Starting August 1st
The FTC confirmed June 2nd that enforcement of its updated “click-to-cancel” rule begins August 1st. The rule is exactly what it sounds like: if a company lets you sign up for a subscription with one click, they are now required to let you cancel with the same ease. No fake phone numbers. No email chains that go nowhere. No “please hold for the next available retention specialist.”
SaaS vendors have until August 1st to get compliant.
Look, it’s a little uncomfortable that we need federal regulation to get companies to behave like decent human beings about cancellation flows. The market should handle this. But it didn’t, and here we are. As a consumer and as someone who manages software subscriptions for clients, I’m not going to pretend this is bad news. If you’ve ever tried to cancel a subscription and felt like you were escaping a timeshare presentation, you know exactly why this rule exists.
Google Cut Gemini 2.5 Pro API Pricing by 30%
Google dropped the API price on Gemini 2.5 Pro by 30%. That’s a real number. And it’s happening at the same time everyone in the industry is talking about how expensive AI infrastructure is getting — which makes it interesting that the actual prices developers pay keep going down. Competition is doing its job.
I’ll be straight with you: I don’t use Gemini. I work primarily with Claude and some open-source models, and I’ve spent time with Grok. So I can’t give you a practitioner’s take on 2.5 Pro specifically. What I can tell you from working with these models is that the cheaper, older, smaller LLMs are really only reliable for narrow, repetitive tasks where the output needs to look roughly the same every time. The more capable models are in a different league — the ability to parse colloquial language, handle ambiguity, work through something genuinely complex — it’s not a small difference.
So a 30% price cut on a high-end model matters more than a 30% cut on a budget one. Whether Gemini 2.5 Pro is worth it compared to the alternatives, I honestly can’t tell you from personal use. But the pricing trend across the whole API market since 2023 has been sharply downward, and that’s good for anyone building tools on top of these systems.
Quick Hits
Zoom patched a high-severity privilege escalation flaw. Privilege escalation means someone with a limited account on your machine can use the vulnerability to get administrator-level access — and once they have that, they can install whatever they want. Update Zoom. Don’t let it sit.
ChatGPT Team plan dropped $20 per user. AI tools keep getting cheaper. We’ll keep noting it.
QuickBooks Simple Start is offering 90 days of free AI cashflow forecasting. I’ll be honest — I’ve had cashflow forecasting features in QuickBooks for years and always found them pretty limited, because QuickBooks doesn’t actually know when your customers are going to pay you. But it’s free for 90 days, so if you’re on Simple Start, try it. Just know what you’re getting into when the free period ends.
Check your RDP exposure. Update Zoom. Run Windows Update for the printer fix. That’s your homework. See you next week.
Questions about anything we covered today? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with your business in mind.