US & UK on alert for possible cyberattack
On Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the UK National Cyber Security Center issued a first-ever joint statement warning businesses and residents of both nations that a wide-scale …
It seems like every other day we hear another story about a massive data and security breach at a major corporation or public institution. If you own a small to medium-sized business (SMB), perhaps you think that these types of threats don’t concern you — that your company is too small for anyone to notice or bother with a cyberattack.
Perhaps you’ve turned on the news and caught wind of warnings about, umh, some countries allegedly trying to mess with other countries’ cyber networks and infrastructure — even private homes. And now you’re worried. What does this mean? Will my devices stop working? Is my internet safe? What do I do?
Today, I shared new findings from Avast’s continued investigations of the CCleaner APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) at RSA.
Nearly 50,000 Minecraft accounts have been infected with malware designed to reformat hard-drives and delete backup data and system programs, according to Avast data from the last 30 days. The malicious Powershell script identified by researchers from Avast’s Threat Labs uses Minecraft “skins” created in PNG file format as the distribution vehicle. Skins are a popular feature that modify the look of a Minecraft player’s Avatar. They can be uploaded to the Minecraft site from various online resources.
If you are in San Francisco this week, check out RSA at the Moscone Center and swing by the Avast booth to witness the effects of real-time cryptomining firsthand. We’ll be hosting a challenge that reveals the vulnerabilities in IoT and mobile devices through the mining of Monero using smartphones. We will also have a PC on display as an infected Amazon Fire TV stick forces it to cryptomine, so the effects (such as overheating) will be plain to see.
PC makers often preload your desktop and laptop with toolbars, app trials, advertising software and other programs that you don’t want – all software commonly known as “bloatware.” The result? A super slow PC that runs out of disk space faster than you can fill it. In this blog post we’ll show you a few easy steps to help you get rid of such stuff.
Microsoft releases system updates on the second Tuesday of each month, and this month’s “Patch Tuesday” is a whopper. It covers nearly 70 security issues, 20 of which are rated “critical.”
Ad blockers exist for every platform—desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. But is it worth it to install this software? On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer. We fast-forward through the commercials on television, throw out the junk mail we find in our mailboxes, delete the spam that infests our email inboxes, so why wouldn’t we want to eliminate those obnoxious and distracting ads that ruin our browsing experience?
We’ve discussed why SMBs are such attractive targets to cybercriminals, and what the key vulnerabilities are, but let’s talk now about how to protect these attack surfaces. Once an MSP identifies all the physical and virtual computing devices in their SMB client’s organization, the next step is to secure all the data, as well as the devices, and to put measures in place to protect the SMB’s people.