Let’s say it’s a Monday morning. You’re headed into work—there’s a light drizzle coming down and traffic is backed up from an accident at the large intersection close to your building.
Frustrated, you wait for the accident to clear and get to the office nearly 30 minutes late. You hurriedly rush in the front door and notice the receptionist gone from her desk. You look in a few more offices and no one is to be seen.
As you are heading to your office you notice everyone congregated in the lunch room. No one is smiling. Your accountant is crying—she’s exclaiming that all of the hours of work she’s put in (including overtime that weekend) are gone.
What’s going on?
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Remember way back when? Those times where you’d leave your house completely unlocked? Where you weren’t worried about someone breaking in or stealing anything?
Maybe it was because you didn’t really have much you perceived as irreplaceable. Or maybe it was because you didn’t really care about things like that.
But more likely it was because you trusted your neighbors and those in your community to respect boundaries. You’d not heard of any break-ins and never thought it could happen to you.
We’ve been living that ‘old days’ life in cyberspace for years now—in fact, in the past 20 years of running Dynamic Edge, I think a good portion of it was not having to worry about people breaking into network (although being a security guy, I was always thinking about it and finding ways to keep my clients’ data secure).
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A lot of security is invisible in black boxes. This is how a lot of my clients perceive. Frankly, they are not entirely wrong here.
When my security team goes into evaluating and fixing an organization’s network before they fall for a ransomware attack or data breach, I always see at least a few serious problems related to service accounts—vendors that needed access at one point in time, who have carte blanche access to your network OR vendors that have requested that your network is configured in a certain way (the specifics of which make you and your data more vulnerable to attacks).
This year when I attended the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas—an event that all of the major security companies and cybersecurity experts make an effort to attend—some startling statistics were ringing throughout the halls, catching security-minded experts’ ears.
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I know I’ve brought this up several times at this point, but those of you with lingering Windows 7 machines within your network are growing targets of cybercrime.
After news broke a couple of weeks ago about devastating attacks coming out from an attack specifically targeting vulnerabilities within the Windows 7 operating system, I want you to rethink your strategic approach to replacing your Windows 7 machines—especially those of you that are setting and forgetting the issue for a later date.
What this new attack is doing is targeting an exploit that Windows has already released a patch for.
The issue?
Many organizations are FAILING to patch Windows 7 machines, thinking they are no longer worth the effort. This is putting your entire network at jeopardy of a serious data breach—or even worse—a major ransomware attack. This vulnerability, named BlueKeep is enabling cyber criminals to easily deliver malicious code onto those Windows 7 machines and subsequently spreading viruses throughout your network.
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When I was little my mom would force me to wash my hands before dinner after coming in from playing with the chickens in the coop (yes, I grew up on a farm way up in Northern Michigan and was very prone to getting dirty).
I’d run to the sink, splash a little water on my dirty fingers and then head on into the kitchen for whatever mom was whipping up.
I put little effort in really getting clean, kind of negating the true reasons why Mom really wanted my hands washed before I joined my parents at the table for dinner.
As I grew up, I saw why hand washing was important, but really didn’t know how much washing was enough. Not until I was told specifically that 20 seconds of hand washing was the magic number (I believe this is equivalent to 2 rounds of “Happy Birthday To You”) that I started forming a habit of 20-second hand washing before eating.
Why in the heck am I bringing up hand washing today?
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I’m sure you’re thinking “I’ve already been spending hard earned money on equipment that is keeping me safe, why would I do anything else?”
The reality of cyber crime in 2019 is far different from when it was first emerging 10 or even 20 years ago. Way back in the early 2000’s, the extent of a crime might be simply someone interested in testing the boundaries of what they could do or where they could access online.
Maybe someone was looking to maliciously use data, such as credit card numbers or other personal information to impersonate your identity, but channels to accessing this data were less talked about back then compared to today.
While technology such as firewalls and spam filtering have made theft and security less of an issue over the past years, criminals are evolving with technologies.
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