Happy Monday, small business owners — grab that coffee, because today we’re covering three active security threats you need to know about right now; a genuinely useful Microsoft Copilot update for manufacturers and job shops; a 0% SBA loan that could carry you through the tariff crunch; and a handful of quick hits including a free NIST checklist, an FCC broadband discount deadline, and a Microsoft print spooler fix that will make your shop floor team very happy.
Let’s get into it.
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Patch Your Fortigate VPN — Not Tomorrow, Today
CISA added CVE-2026-4123 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on June 14th. That’s not a “we think someone might eventually try this” advisory. That’s CISA saying attackers are actively using this flaw right now, in the wild. There’s a difference, and it matters.
The affected versions are Fortigate 7.4 and older. Version 7.6 shipped in 2024, so if you’re still running 7.4, you’ve been sitting on an unpatched firewall for a while. I get it — firewalls are one of those things that hum quietly in the corner and nobody wants to touch them. But “it’s been working fine” is not a security posture.
If you’re doing any work for federal agencies, there’s a hard remediation deadline attached to this. Get it done.
For our ACS clients: we’re already on it. We saw this come across yesterday and the team is patching and verifying across the board.
If you’re not an ACS client and you have a Fortigate on your network, call your MSP today and ask them two questions: what version are we running, and has CVE-2026-4123 been patched? If they don’t know the answer off the top of their head, that’s useful information about your MSP.
Ubiquity EdgeRouters: Another Active Exploit, Same Urgency
Also hitting the news on June 13th: two separate CVEs affecting Ubiquiti EdgeRouter models. These things are everywhere in manufacturing environments — inexpensive, capable, and apparently right now, a target.
The advisory suggests disconnecting the EdgeRouter from shop floor equipment and routing traffic through a separate patched device. I’ll be honest with you — in practice, the cleaner answer is just to patch it. That’s what we do.
I checked with our team: we don’t have any EdgeRouters deployed in our client base, though we do use other Ubiquiti products. Those are kept current. But if you’ve got an EdgeRouter sitting between your office network and your shop floor machines and nobody’s touched the firmware in two years, this is your sign.
Two active exploits in two days on network perimeter devices. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a pattern. The people probing these vulnerabilities are not waiting for you to get around to it.
Copilot Just Got Interesting for Job Shops and Manufacturers
Okay, now for something I’m actually excited about.
Microsoft rolled out a foundational ERP connector for Copilot on June 9th, and this week they expanded it to cover Sage 100, Epicor Kinetic, and JobBoss. If you run a job shop or a small manufacturer, those names probably sound familiar. We have clients on all three of those platforms.
What this actually means: Copilot can now reach into your on-premise ERP system through a secure connector and pull data without requiring you to migrate anything to the cloud. That last part is the engineering decision I want to highlight, because it’s the right call. A huge portion of manufacturers are still running on-premise systems — for compliance reasons, for practical reasons, because the cloud migration math never penciled out. Microsoft finally stopped pretending everyone already moved and built a connector that meets you where you are.
Early users are reporting something like 30-40% faster quote generation. If your shop is doing 20 quotes a week, that’s not a rounding error — that’s real time back in someone’s day.
Alert readers will notice this is very new. The foundational connector is two weeks old. The Sage 100 and JobBoss expansion is days old. So we’re not talking about a mature, battle-tested rollout here. We’re talking about something worth watching closely and piloting carefully.
One more thing worth knowing: if you want the AI to stay entirely inside your four walls and never touch the public internet, that’s achievable. We’ve been building toward exactly that kind of deployment. The point is you have options — and “I don’t want my production data going through Microsoft’s servers” is a completely valid requirement that doesn’t have to mean you sit out the AI wave entirely.
Quick Hits Worth Two Minutes of Your Time
SBA 0% working capital loans for tariff-affected manufacturers. The SBA quietly launched a 90-day, 0% interest working capital loan program on June 13th. Up to $250,000, and they’re targeting a 10-day approval turnaround rather than the usual 60-90 day slog. If the tariff situation has put a cash flow squeeze on your business, this is worth looking at. Go to SBA.gov and search “tariff relief working capital.”
Free NIST OT/IT segmentation guide. NIST published a free 28-page checklist specifically for manufacturers under 100 employees — five steps, low-cost firewall rules, written for people who are not running a dedicated IT security team. If you’ve been meaning to think about how your office network and your shop floor equipment are (or aren’t) separated, this is a good starting point and it costs you nothing.
FCC broadband discount — July 15th deadline. Small businesses under 100 employees may qualify for $30 a month off their broadband bill, but you have to complete a new FCC verification by July 15th or you lose it. Worth five minutes to check.
Microsoft patched the print spooler crash. If you have domain-joined shop floor PCs — and most of our manufacturing clients do, because that’s how on-premise software works — this patch matters. Print spooler crashes are the kind of thing that generates support tickets at the worst possible moment. It’s patched. Make sure your machines are current.
Anyway.Busy week here, and I appreciate you spending a few minutes of yours with me. Stay on top of those patches — the Fortigate and Ubiquiti items especially are not “get to it when you can” situations. They’re “get to it today” situations.
See you next week. — Albert
Questions about anything we covered today? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with your business in mind.