That little black home router with the funny antennae and shiny lights could be part of an army of devices conscripted to take down the internet. It sounds dramatic, but regular people’s internet-enabled devices – routers, webcams, printers, and so on – were used in a massive online attack that shut down a huge part of the internet for hours one Friday morning last October. With the number of connected devices estimated to reach 50 billion by 2020, you can be guaranteed that cybercriminals will attempt it again.
Like most of us, you probably got the router you use in your home from your internet service provider. Like most of us, you probably have not changed the password. And like most of us, you probably didn’t even know there was a password to be changed, much less how to access it.
When computers were still relatively new, antivirus software defended against the only existing threat at the time – viruses. Today, users must protect themselves and their devices from viruses and from malware such as ransomware, as well as malicious activities carried out by cyber crooks, including Wi-Fi snooping to steal personal information, account breaching, and infecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices to perform DDoS attacks. You may be wondering, then, how to protect yourself from so many – and such diverse – threats.
While small and medium businesses don’t appear to be as concerned about their cybersecurity vulnerabilities as they should be – i.e. SMBs are the principal targets of cybercrime and as many as 60 percent of hacked SMBs go out of business after six months – the reality is that the growing and rapidly changing threatscape and limited resources are driving them to outside help to protect their businesses. That protection can include assessments, remote monitoring and management, and backup and disaster recovery, but one way to stand out from the competition is to focus on their risk tolerances and customize your offerings to their individual risk appetites.
In cooperation with researchers from CERT.PL, we are happy to announce the release of another decryptor tool, for the ransomware,CryptoMix. CryptoMix has multiple aliases, including CryptFile2, Zeta, or the most recent alias CryptoShield.
We recently released a new version of our flagship PC product, Avast 2017, which uses various engines, including CyberCapture, to scan for threats. Our engines are protection layers, that can step in at different stages to safeguard you from threats. A…
Whether internal or external, accidental or malicious, the cybersecurity threatscape is huge and growing, but successfully protecting your information, and your business, is not as difficult as you might think.
In the first of a three-part series, I’ll address how a framework consisting of these three pillars provides the basics for effective cybersecurity.
In the movie Ghostbusters, the imaginary threats ranged from Psychomagnotheric Slime to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Gozer the Gozerian, armed with slime and a bagful of Hollywood special effects. In the real world, small and medium businesse…
Websites using HTTPS can increase privacy, as the connection between the browser and the website’s server is encrypted. This means that the browser and the web server are the only points that see your browsing activity and the data you enter. Today, anyone who owns a URL can obtain a TLS/SSL certificate, needed to encrypt the web traffic, and create a HTTPS website. This, of course, includes cybercriminals. Because of this, back in 2014, Avast introduced a way to scan HTTPS URLs for malicious activity in order to protect our users from being infected via malware transmitted over HTTPS sites.
A decade ago the desktop PC was the primary connection to the Internet, and security was a whole lot easier. Fast forward to today and the threatscape has increased exponentially: More devices, more data, more locations, more malware attacks, and less …