How to deal with Ransomware.

Deal with Ransomware

I want to come back to this topic on how to deal with Ransomware. This is because I keep meeting business people in the training that I deliver who, either know of somebody or have themselves, suffered a Ransomware incident.

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Posh POS was Compromised

POS was compromised

A headline worthy of The Register and I’m surprised they didn’t grab it. So what POS was compromised? Well none other than Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Off Fifth and Lord & Taylor. 

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Meltdown and Spectre

Meltdown

You probably can’t have missed the reports about the cyber-Armageddon that are circulating today. Two very significant vulnerabilities have been found in the processor chips that are used by nearly every single computer, tablet, phone and smart toaster.

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Dodgy e-mail that looks legit.

Dodgy e-mail

I received a dodgy e-mail on my personal account yesterday. I’m surprised the GMail spam filters didn’t catch it and flag it for me. Like last weeks story, this message looked kinda plausible.

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Draughty Backdoor in popular application.

Backdoor

It was revealed a couple of days ago that a widely used application had a backdoor in it. A specific version of CCleaner, a well known utility for doing housekeeping on computers, had been compromised by evil doers. 

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Phishing subject lines – Top 10.

Phishing Subject Lines

What would you expect if you got an e-mail with the subject line of “Security Alert”? How about “Unusual sign-in activity”? You probably expect it to be an e-mail that is trying to raise your awareness about some potential security issue. I’m afraid it is likely not. These are just two examples from the Top…

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Communication is vital after a disaster.

Communication is vital after a disaster

Maersk Line were one of the biggest victims of the Petya/NotPetya Ransomware worm that struck on 27th June 2017. Here are some details, in case you missed it. Two weeks later, they are still not back to full operational capacity, but they are doing something really well. The are using the critical competence of communication…

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How a typo can cause you problems.

Typo squatting

Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. One of the most common mistakes, in particular with mobile phones and their small keyboards, is the simple typo. Did you know that the evil doers have got sneaky ways that they try to capitalise on your fumbling fingers? It’s a technique called “Typosquatting“.

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Fireball – 1,000 times bigger than Wannacry.

Fireball malware

Have you seen the news reports and headlines about Fireball? No? That’s odd. 250 million PCs are infested with it. That’s a thousand times more machines around the world than WannaCry (you do remember WannaCry don’t you, or was it sooo two weeks ago ?). So you would think the news organisations would be all…

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Sick subtitles can infect your media player

Evil subtitles

Do you use a media player like VLC, Kodi, Popcorn Time or Strem.io? Perhaps you are using one of those “dodgy” Android boxes? If so you will want to update them to their latest version ASAP because it is possible that they might pick up subtitles that can compromise the machine that you are playing…

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WannaCry no more. At least for now.

WannaCry no more

I’m just going to have a short article this week, just to close off the WannaCry story and counter any of the misinformation that was spread by some supposed “experts”. WannaCry is still circulating and affecting machines, but thanks to the kill switch discovered by @MalwareTechBlog, it is more or less neutralised now. Those machines still…

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Do you WannaCry? I didn’t think so.

Do you WannaCry?

I delayed this week’s blog, just to let some of the dust settle on the whole WannaCry (also known as WCry or WannaCrypt) furore and see if we can learn anything from it that will help protect my readers going forward. I’ll start with some easy background on Ransomware and them explain what was special…

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Payment card breach at nearly 1,200 hotels in the US.

Payment card breach at IHG

The InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) were hit by a payment card breach at some 1,175 of their franchise hotels, virtually all of which are based in the USA. This breach occurred between September 29th 2016 and December 29th 2016 and was as a result of malicious software (malware) somehow being installed on systems that were…

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Hackers released NSA hacking tools … World continues to turn ?.

NSA Hacking tools

You probably missed it – but don’t worry, I’m here to give you the simple low-down ?. The Cyber Security world was in meltdown for some of last weekend about the fact that a hacking group known as Shadow Brokers had released a load of NSA hacking tools to the internet and this meant everyone was…

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Really – Don’t open that Word attachment! It is malware.

Word malware

It was reported over last weekend that there was a Microsoft Word vulnerability that allowed a type of Word malware (malicious software) to infect a persons PC/Laptop simply by opening the document. Even having macros disabled would not protect the victim. So what happens?

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