You wouldn’t leave your car or house unlocked for thieves to break into.

So why do so with one of your business’s most important pieces of equipment – your computer network?

That in essence is what you are doing when you continue to run Windows XP two months after Microsoft discontinued its support of that operating system.

(Systems with Microsoft Security Essentials and its aligned Malicious Software Removal Tool will continue to receive anti-malware signature updates through July 14, 2015. But that shouldn’t be confused with the operating system itself being protected.)

What does end of support mean for the 25 percent of businesses still using XP? No new security updates, non-security patches, fee or paid support options or online technical content updates starting April 9, 2014.

The wisest solution is to upgrade to a machine with Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 (Windows Vista will hit the end of its life in 2017, making it not a viable long-term answer).

But that means substantial upfront cost, an option that’s unattractive to many business owners. So they will stick with what they have, cross their fingers and hope for the best.

While running XP until the hardware it is installed on fails may seem like the least-expensive short-term solution, other potential problems need to be factored into the cost.

Security should be uppermost among those concerns. Without critical security updates, your network may become more vulnerable to harmful viruses, spyware and other malicious software which can steal or damage business data. Even before the loss of updates, XP already had a significantly higher infection rate than other operating systems.

Second, businesses that are governed by regulatory obligations such as HIPAA may find that they are no longer able to satisfy compliance requirements.

Finally, software vendors will stop supporting their products running on XP and hardware manufacturers will stop supporting XP on existing and new hardware.

So keeping XP becomes more expensive, not just in terms of maintenance, but also from potential infections and lost productivity.

HCP recommends migrating to a newer machine preloaded with a newer operating system (OS). This is usually more cost effective than trying to upgrade an old machine with a newer OS and avoids the risk of slowing down your machine with a more modern version of Windows.

Stay safe.

As many of you have probably heard, there is a security exploit out in the open called the Cryptolocker virus or Cryptolocker infection.

What is it? It is unlike normal viruses or malware that you may have had experience with before. The Cryptolocker virus is a piece of malware that holds your computer and its data at ransom. When you get the cryptolocker package installed on your machine, the first thing it does is look over your computer for user-created data files. These include all the typical files one would create with Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, text documents, documents created with any of the open source office replacement suites, PDFs, and just about any type of picture, video, or music files. Before, viruses would simply render these files useless by corrupting the file or deleting it. Cryptolocker is different in this regard.  It quickly and efficiently encrypts these user data files with a public/private encryption key set.

Now the encryption keys that Cryptolocker uses are just about unbreakable. This is because it uses a key anywhere from 2,048 bits to 4,096 bits. A key space this large would take a supercomputer many months if not years to break by trying one guess at a time. The creators of the Cryptolocker infection therefore hold your computer files at ransom with this encryption and demand money in order to get the decryption key and program you need to decrypt these files. This ransom fee has been anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 depending on what the current rate of bit coins is to U.S. dollars and how many they demand. Paying the ransom is not a recommended choice obviously because it is expensive and you don’t want to be sending the creators your hard-earned money.

Cryptolocker is the original widespread infection that operates as an encryption ransomware. It was only a matter of time but Cryptolocker has started a trend in the virus/infection way of doing things. At this time and day, there has been an additional 10-plus similar but different encryption-based ransom infections found in the wild. Each have varying degrees of similarity to Cryptolocker, however some are even more dangerous and damaging. There’s even a version that has been discovered to run on android phones; currently Gingerbread os and above versions.  Unfortunately this looks to be a trend for the future as hackers/malware creators these days look to make the most money for the least amount of effort from their actions.

Check our next blog entry for directions on how to combat Cryptolocker.

Stay Safe

Social Engineering – What is it?

Everyone probably has heard the term social engineering in the news a lot lately with the various cyber attacks, viruses, and scams going on. 

What is social engineering, one may ask?  While your first assumption would probably be that it has something to do with a social network such as Facebook or Twitter, this is not the case.  Social engineering is the deliberate and crafty attempts by hackers to gain access to your data by either tricking you or those that protect your data into handing it over. 

Social engineering is one of the biggest attack vectors these days, with security ever increasing.  It is the most often overlooked part of security and one of the easiest ways a hacker can gain access to your data with limited effort. 

How does it work?  A hacker tries to pose as a corporation, user, technician or someone else with a company or service to which you trust your data.  Usually attempts come in the form of an email or commonly a phone call.  What the hacker is looking to get is your access to the data, in the form of your passwords or the way you can reset these passwords, such as your private email address.  Often times these cyber-criminals will actually even try to pose as you, when calling a bank for instance. 

One of the recent cyber-frauds which are happening is domain name registration theft.  What happens here is a cyber-criminal scours the Internet usually by social networking to find out personal details on an individual that owns or controls a domain name.  This information is then very handy for the cyber-criminal to use in calling the domain-name registrar in order to have an account password reset or to have an account email change processed.  At this point it’s really up to the customer support agent to be the last line of defense. 

In most cases hackers have been able to have an account reset processed by only knowing an email address or last four digits of a credit card number on file because they were able to gain the trust of the customer-support agent.  Once the hacker has been able to have a password reset processed and gains access to your account, it’s then an uphill battle, depending on the company, to get your access back.  If you own a business and rely on your unique domain name, this could be a disaster.

The simple way to stop this is to mark on your account by calling and verifying who you are, that under no circumstances are phone call account resets allowed.  Most companies and services will allow an individual to request this.  In most cases this puts an end to it and hackers will not be able to social engineer your account any longer.

Stay Safe