We have been hearing many ‘war stories’ regarding how damaging the recent influx of the Cryptolocker virus has been to Western Australian Companies. It’s painful to see a company grind to a halt because an employee unknowingly opened an email attachment because this virus can infect the whole network through one computer. Don’t play the blame…
We have been hearing many ‘war stories’ regarding how damaging the recent influx of the Cryptolocker virus has been to Western Australian Companies. It’s painful to see a company grind to a halt because an employee unknowingly opened an email attachment because this virus can infect the whole network through one computer.
Don’t play the blame game, however, it’s not their fault, it happens on busy days where work needs to be done. The dangerous emails are disguised as legitimate emails, it is extremely difficult to assess whether it is real or not. The Cryptolocker virus takes hold of your valuable files and holds them to ransom if you don’t pay up you will lose all your files forever. This is why the Cryptolocker Virus needs to be stopped before it even reaches your employees.
Below we have put together 7 levels of security your business needs today to protect against all manner of intrusions.
1. Daily backups – If for some reason right now your company is NOT doing daily backups, stop reading this right now and call your IT and get it set up. Backups save lives, if all else fails you can always go back to a previous backup, the longer the time period between your backups the more damage a virus can do. If your company is down for an hour you could lose hundreds, if it’s down for multiple days it could be thousands.
2. Spam Emails – For general spam emails you can set-up ISP filtering which has been known to slow spam down, contact your ISP or IT Company for this. This works well for the most common and generic spam emails.
3. Advanced Spam Filtering – The next step is to use a 3rd party Spam filtering system like Barracuda, which will filter your emails by scanning and analyzing incoming email content. This is the best way to fight viruses before reaching your network. This system can scan inside zip and RAR files for that pesky Cryptolocker.
4. 3rd Party Spam Software – You can use a Web Content Keeper, this is used to stop people going to potentially unsafe websites. Educating your employees on how to spot dangerous websites and links goes a long way to keeping your data safe.
5. Scanners – A Virus scanner on every station would protect against real-time attacks through emails & websites that were harmful. This is the last bastion of hope if something arrives in your emails a good anti-virus software will stop it in its tracks.
6. Company Procedures – Setting some ground rules is also very important, you can limit what type of documents could be received by email – no zip files, exe's, macro embedded documents, HTML or similar files. Contact your IT for this simple tip.
7. Black Listing – This method is a bit of a hit and miss but will eventually work, blacklist any email addresses that are not registered in Australian or any internal email address that did not come from your own mail server. If users needed a particular email address to be allowed – your IT would specifically whitelist that email address and release any quarantined emails from that particular email.
I hope these 7 tips give you something to think about, it’s never too late to start protecting your important business data.
