Unfortunately, Macs might be the sports cars of the IT business, but just like any car, they need proper maintenance to keep running. In this guide we’ll walk you through the essentials — and even some great secrets — to clean up invisible clutter and tune up your MacBook, iMac, or Mac Pro beyond its limits.
Weekly security roundup week of March 12th
Samba admins urged to patch
An important vulnerability that came to light this past week is one in the venerable Samba open-source networking stack – and if you’re a Samba admin, you need to update now.
Endpoints are an easy target for hackers, so it’s essential that small businesses protect themselves. Connected employees, vulnerable software and weak antivirus all contribute to this being a favorite target of hackers. And, as the list below details, there are many types of cyberattacks that target endpoints, from phishing to malvertising.
Our new Avast Business endpoint security products are once again in the spotlight, highlighted in CRN’s 2018 Security 100 list of the 20 Coolest Endpoint Security Vendors.
In November 2017, we detected a strain of malware known as JSMiner in Google Play. The Monero cryptomining capabilities were discovered inside the gaming application Cooee. At the time of discovery, we forecasted a rise in mobile mining malware as atta…
“Alexa, please let any would-be robbers know that I’m currently out of town and my house is sitting empty.”
Cybercriminals are aggressively uploading cryptocurrency mining malware to GitHub. The cybercriminals fork other projects, which on Github means producing a copy of someone else’s project, to build upon the project or to use as a starting point and subsequently push a new commit with the malware to the project. The projects which have been forked appear to be chosen at random. A list of affected GitHub repositories can be found at the bottom of this blog post.
For small business owners, cash flow and sales are top of the agenda, leaving little time to focus on cybersecurity. Many small businesses will never reach a size at which they need or can afford a devoted IT support person, let alone a whole department. Of course, this doesn’t mean small businesses don’t need to protect themselves from cyberattacks. Thankfully, there are easy ways that SMB owners can manage their cybersecurity, protect their devices and prevent data breaches without an IT department.
Lawmakers urge better security for smart devices
The first indication that internet of things (IoT) devices posed a real security threat came in October 2016 when a botnet — made up of devices such as security cameras infected with Mirai malware — attacked Dyn, a provider of DNS services.The attack came in the form of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) assault on Dyn’s servers. By firing off multiple requests every second, the attack took down websites all over the USA and Europe, as DNS servers were overrun with requests from millions of infected devices.
The customer
Golden West Technologies delivers managed security, infrastructure, wide-area networking, and unified communications services to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) in western South Dakota. The Rapid City-based company serves a wide spectrum of industries, including state and local governments, banking, healthcare, education, mining, manufacturing, and Native American tribal organizations. “Our managed services focus gives us a geographic advantage,” explains Operations Manager Chris Brickey, “as we can remotely deliver a range of IT and security services to a broad mix of customers across the state without adding physical locations or new staff.”