Affordable Unified Threat Management and Defenses In Depth
A Story about the need for Unified Threat Management in Small Businesses
Let me guess, you're probably on your computer about two or three hours a day. Then again, if you work on a computer at home or in a small business, you may spend the majority of your day on a PC or workstation. Now, all that time you spend typing, surfing, downloading, reading, and sending, I hope you're taking some basic security precautions. After all, the last thing you need is a Trojan horse or irreversible virus destroying your system or worse stealing your data. This can be a headache and a half. Not only can it ruin your work, but it can cost you your entire hard drive, and quite deviously an empty bank account. There's no doubt you need some decent e-mail security, webfilters, and anti virus protection. Collectively known as Unified Threat Management (UTM).
Why bank accounts? I do not know about you, but I receive many official looking e-mails from the Postal Office, PayPal, Verizon, BoA, the IRS and many others. DO NOT open them or click on a link in them. If you were, a malious piece of software would be installed on your computer, unknowingly to you and perhaps untraceable, that most likely contain a keyboard logger to record your banking credentials. On the Cyber-criminal market these credentials would fetch between $10 and $20 and criminal vendors even provide money-back guarantees. End-result, your banking account is empty.
Here is an example of links that are embedded in these official looking fake e-mails. DO NOT click on them, although I have taken precaution that these links are not good:
#muchways#com/BadLinkHYfgma9c/index.html
#matcherup#com/BadLinkBZBmikS1/index.html
Even to the untrained eye these URL's look bad especially in a PayPal e-mail. But this is also an example of a poorly designed malicious link. More sophisticated means exist to camouflage the malicious URLs.
By-the-way, what about the unlucky businesses that own these two websites? Their web servers have been hi-jacked and are now being used by cyber criminals to steal other peoples money. Not good for their reputation.
In this separate article I discuss how to Keep Spam and Internet Threats Off Your Network - Simple and Affordable Threat Protection for Small Business
Last month the son of a client, let's call him Kyle, got hit hard. Not by some drunken shmoe in a smoky bar either. I'm talking about in his own home. That place where you feel safe and comfortable. Unfortunately security had been lacking when it comes to the wild web. Or at least it seems this way at times. Kyle was doing his usual web browsing or was he on BitTorrent a peer to peer file sharing service notorious for bad files? Then suddenly it happened. Just as he downloaded some computer screen wallpaper, his screen went fuzzy. What was the deal? Kyle was certain he had excellent anti virus protection. How could he get smacked out of nowhere by some random computer virus? Well, sadly his laptop was not the same. He shut it down and tried to restart, but it would not comply. It was time to consult a Computer Systems Technical Support professional.
In the end it was determined that the virus had embedded itself so deeply into the computer system that it would be most cost effective to "wipe out" the operating system and re-install everything. Fortunately Kyle had backed up his most important school papers and music. Had he not, we would have been probably able to do "magic" with some of our software recovery tools. But that is only worthwhile if the files to be recovered have a high value to justify the time spent.
After re installing the operating system one of the first things Kyle did was to immediately go online and download the best anti virus protection he could find. He continues to be very vigilant when opening e-mails and has not joined any Bit Torrent network. I addition Kyle has signed up for a cloud based automatic backup. Our Tech Support technicians recommend Mozy at this time for small backup volumes.
What is a small Fairfield County, Connecticut Business to do? First put in place a comprehensive Unified Threat Management (UTM) system in place that holistically protects your network, checks incoming e-mail, and protects employees from bad websites. The most important defense though, is employee and end user education. Without education most security measures can be circumvented - unfortunately.
I dislike that this is a never-ending story. Just as anti virus protection advances, the nasty viruses advance as well. It is a never-ending arms race between good and bad elements in our society.
Your File-Sharing Downloads Revealed Publicly?
Your Torrent File Downloads and Information Revealed Publicly!
If you, your family, or employees recently downloaded movies, music or software from online file-sharing networks (torrents), chances are pretty high that the website youhavedownloaded dot com has heard about you. In fact, you may find that the titles you downloaded are now listed and publicly searchable at the site.
The technology behind the site recreates in a publicly searchable database what the entertainment industry has been doing for years: It tracks and records information that users share when they download and upload files on public peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The free service makes people think twice about downloading pirated movies, software, games and music, because it shows how easily this information can be discovered and archived.
So far, the site has recorded more than 55 million unique Internet addresses belonging to file-sharing users and 2.1 million file names. The site is searchable by file name and by Internet address (IP address). When you visit, it automatically checks and lets you know if your Internet address is in the database.
Why is IT Security important?
Well, as a computer user, business owner (and parent) you are responsible for what is happening in your computer network. Assume for a moment an employee is downloading music or software illegally from a torrent. The RIAA or the software industry compliance organizations then pick up your IP address which then can be correlated through a Geo-location service such as maxmind dot com to your specific physical address. Voila! The auditors knock on your door and you are in for a very unpleasant time.
The most apparent of all reasons is that failing to meet the necessary licensing standards can result in legal prosecutions. It is essential to achieve software license compliance for deployed applications to ensure their legal usage. Also, avoiding over purchase of software licenses is possible by following proper licensing processes. Furthermore, businesses are able to remove support costs and save expenditure by centralizing the software procurement process. Hence, meeting license compliance helps in containing your IT budget.
Read more about Employee Internet Use for Private Purposes at this link.
Computer Systems Support & Design provides software licenses auditing and inventory services, web-filtering to prevent employee browsing to inappropriate websites, blocking of specific undesired services such as torrents for example, and general "Defense in Depth IT Security" services to Small Business in Fairfield County Connecticut.
