Are security issues in your future?

Ignorance is Bliss!

Face it most of us go about our day either constantly thinking about someone who might be out there targeting our precious identity or we don't. The fact is most people have a lot to worry about. Home and business computers have their own set of issues that are just as scary and should be taken more serious.

Creeping in the back door!!!

If some one slips in the back door of your PC or Mac, either at home or work, they could take over not just your identity but also steal funds from your bank account, tax returns, children's pictures, etc. Take in point the story of a small family owned business that was rising to the top of their market in the area they served.

Husband and Wife make a great team except here!

The husband and wife team were primaries at the business and were too busy to make sure that their computing operations were buttoned up. To put it bluntly their anti virus software was out of date, Microsoft OS updates were set to manual and they had not policy for their employees to follow as to what was ans was not proper use of company computing resources.

Back door what??!!

Needless to say the main computer at the company became infected with a back door trojan virus. What is this you say? A back door trojan virus is almost self explanatory. It is software written to secretly snake it way into your desktop or laptop computer and execute a set of pre-programmed instructions. these instructions can be anything from "erase the hard disk" to "Install yourself and wait for instructions". The virus that infected our profiled business installed itself and them "phoned home" to the author of the software who installed the ability to see exactly what was being done on the main computer belonging to the business.!

The Big Ripoff!

Since it was the main PC everything from banking to employee processing was done on a daily basis. What the cyber criminal in this story was interested in was MONEY1! This person observed and used a key logger to copy the main bank account number, passcode, security questions, amount on deposit, etc. Another function of the backdoor trojans programming the person had the PC once again phone home when there was no activity at the other keyboard for more than four hours. Once notified they logged on remotely, broke into the businesses savings and checking accounts and transferred $92,000 hard earned dollars to Latvia. The bank and insurance company refused to back up the loss due to the fact that it is up to the business to make sure that they have reasonable computer policies and anti virus software in place before the time of the loss.

Kiss it goodbye...

The last they heard after reporting this to the FBI is that the Latvian authorities were either tracking down the criminals to get some of the money back or "their share!" What can we learn from this? It is just as important to supply ourselves and our employees with tools to safeguard our computer assets as it is to supply them with computers!

The kidnapping of your stuff!

Ransomware thieves do the same thing except with your data! They log on and find any files that it seems your business extensively uses. For law firms it might be .pdf's or word documents, for graphics businesses it might be .jpeg picture files. After finding these files the encrypt them into a format that will require a software key to open and use them. Only if you pay them a ridiculous amount of money will they give you a software key to un-encrypt the files back to their original format. The summation is get and keep anti virus and operating system software up to date. It also would not hurt to get a computer policy in place so that employees know how to use computer resources. What do you think?