Welcome to The Senroc Download! This is your weekly briefing from the team at Senroc Technologies letting you know what we're seeing, what we're thinking, and tips you can use right now.

If anyone on your team has been using Excel's built-in AI formula — the one you typed directly into a cell to summarize or categorize data — it stops working on September 14. Microsoft announced it is scrapping the feature just a year after introducing it, and its notice to customers was refreshingly blunt: "We have decided not to move forward with this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience."

The catch is that any spreadsheet built around that formula will break. Microsoft is pointing people to the Copilot side panel instead, which can do similar work — summarizing data, sorting it into categories, drafting content — but it does not live inside your formulas, so it won't automatically recalculate when your numbers change.

This is worth a quick check even if you think nobody used it. Features like this tend to get adopted quietly by whoever is best with spreadsheets, and that person's reports are often the ones the rest of the business relies on.

Takeaway: Before September 14, ask your team whether any Excel files use the AI formula — especially recurring reports, dashboards, or anything feeding a budget. If they do, those formulas need to be replaced with either a manual approach or the Copilot panel. Discovering this when a month-end report silently breaks is a much worse Monday.

A flaw in the screen sharing feature built into macOS is being actively exploited, and Dutch government cyber authorities issued a warning about it this month. Attackers who can reach an affected Mac over the network are getting in without valid credentials and installing software that quietly uses the machine to mine cryptocurrency.

That last detail is worth flagging because it makes the problem easy to dismiss. Crypto mining just slows a computer down, which employees tend to report as "my Mac has gotten really sluggish" rather than as a security incident. But the same access could be used for anything, and mining is often just the first thing installed.

Apple released an emergency update on August 6 covering current and older versions of macOS. This one is only reachable if screen sharing is switched on, which is common in businesses that use it for remote support.

Takeaway: Two things. First, update every Mac in your business — check the Apple menu, System Settings, then General and Software Update. Second, ask whether screen sharing actually needs to be enabled on each machine; if it isn't being used, turning it off closes this off entirely. And if anyone has been complaining their Mac has become slow or the fans keep running, that's worth investigating rather than writing off as an aging computer.

A developer recently discovered that a document containing login details had been quietly indexed by search engines — the credentials were turning up in ordinary search results. The file hadn't been hacked. It had simply been shared with a setting that made it visible to anyone, and search engines did what they do.

This is one of the most common and most preventable exposures we see. Someone shares a file quickly to get a colleague or contractor unblocked, picks the broadest sharing option because it's the one that always works, and then never changes it back. The file stays open indefinitely, and nothing in your systems flags it as a problem.

It's worth understanding the distinction, because it's easy to miss. "Anyone with the link" does not mean "only people I sent the link to." It means genuinely anyone — including anything that crawls the web and finds that link referenced somewhere.

Takeaway: Spend fifteen minutes checking what your business has shared broadly. In Google Drive, search for “owner:me” and review the sharing column. In Microsoft 365, open OneDrive and check the Shared tab. Change anything sensitive from "anyone with the link" to specific named people. Going forward, always share with named individuals rather than using the “anyone with the link” option. It’s slightly more effort, but it could be the difference between your document being open to everyone.