Malware is the biggest cybersecurity threat to your business, we’ve written an article on how to protect your business. Malware is just one form of malicious software. Anything that poses a threat to your cyber security should be treated, such as viruses, worms, trojan horses, ransomware and spyware.
Malware, if it gains access to your system can result in a loss of data, and money and can ruin the business’s reputation. A cyber-attack or data breach can cause irreparable damage to a business, please make sure you or your IT team are doing everything they can to be secure.
Cyber-attacks are more sophisticated now and are known to bypass defences that aren’t kept current. Ransomware is also increasing and up to 90% of the crime today is committed online.
Use the best cyber security software
Years ago businesses used to consider Anti-virus as enough to be considered secure. However, now this is nowhere near enough. An Anti-Virus typically works with pre-existing threats and these are usually signature-based.
Unfortunately, with this method, an unknown variant could mean it gets straight through and can infect your system. It is like having a guard preventing known criminals on a list.
Imagine the criminal turns up in a mask or has drastically changed their look, chances are the guard won’t notice and the criminal will slip through, well that is how the Anti-Virus works, as they are not on the list they are free to cause destruction.
All it takes is the right software to look for suspicious behaviour and it could prevent any threats from going further.
These days we need anti-malware and much better proactive functionality.
Detecting Ransomware
Ransomware has grown massively over the last five years. Sophos surveyed organisations and it was said a ransomware attack hit 37% of organisations surveyed in 2021. That figure was actually higher in 2o20 due to the pandemic, but the costs are growing of repairing the damage.
Ransomware will encrypt your system with the hope of holding it for ransom until you pay. Fortunately, there are experts out that that have managed to decrypt some variants, so they offer free decryption tools. One of the worst parts about Ransomware is that it can be designed to remain undetected for a while and do nothing until triggered by an action, date or the attacker’s request.
Hamilton Group supports one of the best software systems to detect threats and can even roll back a system to a better state should an infection occur, threats can be isolated and issues reversed.
Firewall active and ready for access attempts
I’m sure you’ve heard of a firewall and most routers have a basic firewall but that isn’t enough. All businesses should adopt some sort of managed firewall and the enterprise requirement is even higher.
Businesses are a prime target for cybercriminals, that’s where we come in. Hamilton Group builds a barrier between your system and the attackers. Often this is achieved through a physical hardware device or a piece of Cloud-managed software protecting your devices.
Your IT provider should implement tools that protect against phishing, malicious websites or accessing services that could be harmful to your network.
Your firewall should prevent remote logins without permission or denial of service attacks that can impact multiple services. A good firewall can also protect against vulnerabilities in your system by blocking well-known ports and services, these are typically exploited by attackers.
You may be the biggest weakness, that’s where training comes in
I’ve heard it all before. “This won’t ever happen to me”, but no matter the size of your company you can be a target. I am sure reading this you will think to yourself there’s no way I would fall for a scam.
Shockingly though over 90% of data breaches in 2021 came from email phishing attacks. It is not surprising as since COVID-19 this has been on the rise.
We’ve all had emails about some rich entrepreneur dying and leaving their money to you to claim, they just need you to pay a fee to pay the money to you. But phishing scams get much more sophisticated than that.
A clever phishing attack can go so far as to look genuine in every way and even be from the correct domain, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t spot them.
Consider looking at the grammar used, misspellings of names, and locations and check that the email address is the right one, always call the person to confirm before taking any business actions.
We’ve all heard the term hackers and the reality isn’t like Hollywood, to physically hack would be very hard in today’s tech world. However, getting an unsuspecting employee to click a link while posing as another organisation is a much easier way.
Scammers can send convincing emails that represent the likes of the Government, HMRC, NHS, Royal Mail, Amazon or a delivery firm. Or they may pose as a member of your organisation and through social engineering gain enough information to pose as the boss or another staff member and try to trick or coerce information.
It’s also a great tactic to trigger Malware or to start watching your organisation’s information. Check out or book this particular method for phishing and gaining access.
Please just stay alert, and check for incorrect spelling of email addresses and poor grammar, this is usually a tel-tale sign.
Hamilton Group offer Cyber Security awareness training and we can do either 1-2-1 training or a group. Group training can be good because you can engage a larger audience and it helps everyone to learn together.
We do phishing simulations on clients and use that data to help train and plug missing gaps in education. Just recently we tested a client and out of 22 staff, 3 clicked on the link that was posing as the boss and 1 staff member did this in 2.3 seconds of opening the mail (yes we get great stats).
Methods of access
Malware is typically spread from a vulnerable device, this is often then spread to other devices in proximity which often makes it more important to limit access.
Typically your IT Support provider should have any server infrastructure or file system secured, but it is often not as easy to secure the endpoints.
Our office computers (endpoints) are typically connected to the same network, this will present a way for a would-be attacker to target your network.
There are things we can do in this scenario such as leveraging VLANs and having the right cyber security setup to protect your business.
Restricting access to the data can help too, think, does Joe in accounting need access to the marketing data?
Providing different levels of access and securing where they aren’t required is very important.
Although this won’t prevent malware, it would limit the damage to your business should the worst happen.
You also have offices that operate from home or BYOD (bring your own device), these can be harder to secure but then you can use VPN access or utilise a Virtual Desktop and with Microsoft 365 you can configure the security so users can only access the data they need.
What now?
If anything you’ve read above has got you slightly worried, then please don’t fear it. Getting everything in place to keep you secure is not that difficult, it just takes thinking about things and putting the necessary steps in place.
Speak to an IT expert at Hamilton Group today and we will look after your cyber security to get you into the future.
Call us on 01423 438953 and you can email hello@hgmssp.co.uk or fill out our web form.
