March 2017 Security Bulletin
March 2017 Security Bulletin
“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster” – Sun Tzu
Defending against Cyber Security threats is one of the greatest challenges businesses face in terms of their IT strategy.
This e-mail is designed to act as a guide in the first step of preparing your defences.
The general approach for defending against Cyber attacks, malware and system vulnerabilities is the same regardless of size of business: Ensure all servers and workstations are patched and update 3rd party applications regularly. Restrict administrative access to your systems, and use robust malware protection software.
Atlas Business can ensure your systems are patched, up-to-date and improve security.
What are the threats?
Network Probe / Hostile Scan
A network probe attack can take a wide variety of forms and while some will target specific vulnerabilities in software and exploit packages, others will simply use a brute force approach to passwords in an attempt to gain access to your otherwise protected systems.
The impact to your business would be severe, and could lead to confidential data leaks or even complete loss of data and services.
Atlas Business can help ensure your infrastructure is secure and help prevent any vulnerabilities, by carrying out security scans of your infrastructure on a regular basis and take corrective actions as necessary.
Distributed Denial of Service
DDOS attacks are generally connection or resource based. A connection based attack will attempt to open as many simultaneous connections as it can within the targeted server. A resource exhaustion attack occurs when the server is overwhelmed.
DDOS attacks can have medium to high impacts to your business, resulting in severely degraded performance.
Atlas Business can help prevent almost all DDOS attacks by ensuring you have a well managed hardware firewall and up-to-date security software.
Brute Force Attack
Brute force attacks will usually target a single service with access to the internet, such as remote desktop, Outlook web access, and SMTP services. The attacks will consist of a predictable and systematic check of all possible passwords until the correct one is discovered when it will grant access to the network, often with administration privileges.,
The impact to your business is severe as it can result in data leaks or total loss of service/data.
Atlas Business can implement several measures which will help in preventing brute force attacks.
Phishing Attack
Phishing emails consist of mass email spamming events targeting users, predominantly small and medium size businesses. The emails have an attachment that appears to be genuine and linked to the content of the email, usually a voicemail or invoice.
The attached file is actually malware called CryptoLocker, otherwise known as Ransomware. The CryptoLocker malware encrypts files on servers, and in some cases even backups and then demands a ransom to un-encrypt the files. Keeping up to date with patching on your servers and workstations is one vital step to protecting against malware.
The impact to your business from a ransomware attack can be very severe often leading to a complete loss of data and services unless the ransom is paid. Ransoms can range from £200 to £10,000 payable with bitcoins.
Atlas Business can help you introduce procedures that can reduce the incidence of ransomware attacks and can help ensure your data is protected.
For more information please call us on 0333 6663330.