Wiper malware attack on Sony Pictures
Wiper malware attack on Sony Pictures

Sony Under Attack: The Wiper Malware

Security, , ,
29
Dec 2014

Wiper malware attack on Sony Pictures

The sophisticated Wiper malware which was launched against Sony Pictures does exactly what it sounds like: wipes anything and everything from systems.

“Wiper” uses a malicious set of attacks:

  • Wipe out all information held on hard disks
  • Reboot servers
  • Prevent access to Exchange emails
  • Close down networks
  • Used on all versions of Windows

How Wiper malware works:

  1. The Wiper executable file, recognized as exe, is known as a “dropper” file.
  2. This file will install itself over supporting files and as a trusted Windows service.
  3. It also creates a network share within the system root directory. This allows any other computer over the network to reach it.
  4. It uses the WMI (Windows Management Interface) to communicate with other machines and run code to and from them to spread itself further across the network.
  5. This allows wiper to gain access to any machine on the system via a computer network exploitation (CNE).
  6. Broadcasts are sent out to remote command networks via a “beacon” message, the malware is already accessing the hard drive to delete data by each sector.
  7. It overwrites data with ordinary user privileges by disguising itself as a USB 3.0 device driver.  This is a commercially available disk driver, made by EldoS.
  8. It then instructs the operating system to halt for a couple of hours then wake up with a reboot. By this time, all the data is wiped clean by the malware.

Wiper attack on Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures is a prime example of being on the receiving end of the “Wiper” attack. This particular attack recently gained media attention, got the FBI involved and caused a stir at Antivirus companies.

Wiper malware memo from FBI

A snippet from the FBI memo about Wiper

Speculation at Sony from a Re/code analysis reports links the attack to North Korea. This is partly due to a near identical attack carried out against South Korea by their northerly neighbors. Originally it was claimed the attack was motivated by disgruntled ex-workers who were laid off due to a company restructure earlier in the year.

What can you do?

It’s likely that this kind of attack is mostly aimed at very high profile companies, like in our example above. In general it’s wise to do the following to keep on top of your business or home security:

  • Update Anti-virus definitions. Be sure to have the latest updates from you Antivirus provider. Updates are added regularly to detect and quarantine suspicious files from doing further damage.
  • Verify your backups, and opt for an offsite or Cloud solution, in the case of a catastrophic data loss.
  • Update your critical Windows Servers and desktops with the latest operating system security patches.
  • Avoid being spear fished. Do not open unknown emails which contain attachments or files. Be conscious of spoof emails that may trick you into clicking attachments.
  • Lock down USB usage. With the help of an endpoint management solution, you can set policies to only allow authorized USB devices, which can help prevent this type of attack.
  • Revise your IT policies to only give specific administrators privileges to run, execute and share resources.

For more information about the Wiper virus and how you can protect your business from malicious malware, contact your local IT professionals.

Read More

5 Ways to Spend Your IT Budget

Office IT,
26
Dec 2014

Remaining_budget_IT

It’s that time of the year again. The fiscal year is drawing to a close and you still have money left to spend. Here are 5 ways to tie up IT loose ends.

Why spend your remaining IT budget?

In practical terms, we’re looking at productive suggestions in ways that you can spend your IT budget, without it being wasteful.
Besides, if directors look at the accounts after the year end and see that a significant amount was left unspent, it would be likely that the following year could lead to a cut-back on your IT budget.

The good news is that we have plenty of ideas to share with you on ways to spend your remaining IT budget wisely.

1. Expand your Cloud service and backups

Backup

Consider extending the storage capacity or bandwidth of your current Cloud set up, which can help with productivity and protect your business against catastrophic data loss. It’s always wise to expand your current backup solution. You may have a local solution but why not extend this to an online solution? Y

Revisiting your existing backup process and tying up loose ends is a good way to prevent catastrophic data loss in the future. It’s worth considering a local backup solution that is fire-proof, such as a firesafe. Such a solution you can easily be acquired from IOSafe.

2. Invest in your workforce

training-office-staff

Train up your staff through a course or a consultant. This type of investment will not only benefit their skill set, but it will also motivate them to be productive and take on more challenging roles or tasks. This also acts an incentive to prevent job dissatisfaction and boredom by filling in any gaps in their technical skillsets. The result, having a satisfied and skilled workforce who are confident in carrying out new tasks or responsibilities.

3. Drive up your speed

Hitachi Western Digital Seagate 3tb Hard Drive reliability

We’re talking about hard drives here. It’s a common problem for them to fail, so why not invest in some, even if you don’t need them straight away. You can keep them on standby. We recommend investing in SSD, or solid state drives. They cost just a little more than the usual drives, however, they’ll start up really fast, making a noticeable difference on performance. It’s well worth investing on this if you have the leftover budget.

4. Organize the cabling

Organize_cabling

Do the cables on your server room resemble a bowl of spaghetti? If so, it’s time to consider spending some of that remaining IT budget on an effective tidy cable solution. Look to see if you need to replace old patch cables that are fraying. Try cable tidy tubes which can neatly clip and organize cables or simply hire a professional who can help untangles all those cables that are causing knots and confusion.  This investment will be worth the while!

5. Invest in marketing

Social_Media_Tree

If you’re a single person business, then consider spending the remainder of your IT Budget on digital marketing. Even the tiniest of businesses have an IT budget, which is tracked when the accounts are worked out. Be sure to spend any leftover capital on advertising your business.  This includes having blog articles written on your website, search engine advertising, or social media advertising.

For more ways to reinvest in your business’ technology, contact your local IT professionals.

Read More

Is Your Backup Software Prepared for Catastrophic Data Loss

Backup and Recovery, ,
24
Dec 2014

Broken_Glass_at_office

How much do you value your data? Catastrophic data loss is not just about business continuity but also about validating backup software and data recovery.

We’re going to be taking a look at how you can best prepare your backups for most scenarios which could lead to catastrophic data loss.

Everything from your financial records, employee information to departmental files, or worst still, your entire system, as all at stake!

Building up the picture

What would happen if a disaster occurs taking with it all the data that was stored?

Anything from hard drives crashing to building fires, flooding, earthquakes, theft or any event that could cause data loss, can hit your business very hard, like a ton of bricks.

Alternatively, a break-in could happen and your data ends up stolen. What if a work laptop is lost, out in the public domain and gone forever, possibly winding up on an auction on EBay?

fire-sprinkler-in-office

Would you risk losing months, or even years of precious data that will cause loss of earnings, potential data leaks or embarrassment?

These are only some examples of worst case scenarios. It could happen to anyone.

Being Prepared

The good news is that you can prevent such catastrophes with 4 steps to checking the backups you have put in place long ago:

  1. Verify Backups. Your system administrator will usually manage this. If you’re one yourself, simply check that they are verified and running as scheduled through whichever backup software solution you use.
  2. Restore and test backups. You’ll want to be sure to restore your backups and test your data regularly, checking to see if everything would work smoothly without any backup media corruption.
  3. Offsite / Cloud backup. Having an offsite or Cloud mirror copy of your existing system, which ideally, is backed up on a daily basis. If all data were to be inaccessible at your physical site, you’ll be able to seamlessly restore your most critical data and get the business up and running.
  4. Recovery plan. This may be the last step, but is far from being the least important.

  • The recovery plan should contain emergency contact numbers of who to contact. For instance, of relevant IT admins, your offline disaster recovery center, the company director and any specific staff to keep them in the know.
  • Ideally a recovery plan can be presented as a hardcopy/document, as well as, a document hosted over the cloud, and distributed to all IT admin staff, plus a manager or director (to be extra cautious) is essential.
  • You may go as far as providing a copy to your Disaster recovery test centre or your offsite provider, as discussed in point 3.

Internal procedures will vary from business to business, so design one to meet suit your system setup.

Amidst the panic and chaos, you or your System Admin will be presented with 101 things to do. A documented Recovery plan will help you be organised and speed things up nicely. Say if your designated disaster recovery administrator happened to be away in a catastrophe, then at least a procedure is in place for another admin to follow.

Be Prepared for Anything

Like they say, prevention is better than a cure. You’ll never know when a disaster can occur, so be sure to review all the above steps and apply it to you disaster recovery plan today. If you have one in place, it’ll never go amiss to revise, improve and update it.

To put together a disaster recovery plan or backup systems to protect your business, contact your local IT professionals.

Read More

5 Most Important Considerations of a New PC

hardware, Office IT, ,
18
Dec 2014

Computers_on_shelves

Whether you’re buying a new PC for the office, your business or personal use, here are the features you should focus on to get the most bang for your buck.

We’re going to highlight the 5 most important features to look for in a new PC. But before we delve onto our list of five important features, let’s discuss a preliminary checklist:

  • What are you going to use your PC for? You’ll need to determine if you’re going to be using to for work, where potentially, data protection and backups will be crucial. Even if it’s for personal use, you’ll still want to consider securing your data and backing up your documents, photos, emails and so forth, periodically.
  • What software will you use? General word processing and other similar office applications are not so resource intensive. On the other hand, if you are planning on using a resource hungry program, such as a graphic design software, or anything that requires a PC with a fast processor and plenty of memory, you’ll need to take note of the minimum specifications. Even the minimum specifications on a PC for any given software will not guarantee the best performance. 
  • Optical CD drive, anyone? If anyone remembers the phasing out of the floppy disk drives in the mid nineties, the same thing is happening to optical CD drives. They are fast becoming a legacy component, thanks to this age of digital downloads, portable USB storage and online video streaming sites. You’ll need to consider whether you’ll want one with an optical drive or not. Alternatively, you can purchase an external CD/ DVD drive if you really needed one for any intended purpose.

With all these preliminary requirements covered, let’s now dive into our checklist for the 5 most important features to look for when shopping for a new PC

  1. Customer support.

customer_support

When it comes purchasing something new, you’ll want peace of mind and know that you can call a phone support line and have a warranty to replace faulty parts. Also, some PCs may require registration in order to activate its warranty, so if you’ve any questions, you know where to call.

  1. Opt for reputable brands.

Lenovo-HP-Dell

Brands like Dell, HP or Lenovo, have a well-established community which also means that finding replacement parts is easy and less of a struggle.

  1. Double-check the preloaded software.

30_days_free_trial

Never feel too afraid to ask the sales rep about the software that comes pre-loaded with the PC. If you need a full version of Office software, make sure it has that and not just trial versions or 90 days’ worth of the full version. This is important if you heavily rely on using such software, as you won’t appreciate a break in your productivity whilst acquiring the full version!

  1. Watch out for unnecessary software.

Too_many_programs

Be sure to find out if it comes loaded with junk software from the manufacturer pressuring you to sign up to their services. This is often a sales pitch, and from our experience, a complete waste of time, money and digital space! Just focus on what you really need and stick to your requirements.

  1. Check the PC’s specifications.

fast-computer

You’ll want to look for a PC that has a fast processor and plenty of RAM. Many store sales brag about sub $300 systems, when in reality they are cutting corners like memory and processor speed.

Too often people have been mis-sold the wrong type of PC and software that comes with it.  Don’t be afraid to ask how systems you are comparing stack up against others in the market.

For more tips and advice on deploying the right PC workstations for your business or home office, contact your local IT professionals.

Read More

5 Benefits of Virtualizing a Server

Office IT, virtualization,
16
Dec 2014

Virtualizing_a_server

Virtualizing a server can bring many benefits spanning cost, power savings, ease of management and business continuity.  Here’s what you should know.

Since we’ve been exploring the meaning of virtualization in some of our past articles, let’s quickly re-cap what it is for those of you who need a gentle reminder.

A virtual server is a projection of a physical server that can run with its own operating system, hosting applications and hold network files. A virtual server can co-exist with many other virtual servers within a single host machine.

Let’s take a quick look into what physical servers are and some issues they face:

  • Both physical and virtual servers are designed to serve resources such as an application or files over a LAN (local area network) to your office computers or within a datacenter.
  • Physical servers are larger computers that come built with powerful processors, large hard disks and a large amount of memory, which often have more than one of each component.
  • They are considered to be the “workhorses” of the physical computer world. As a result, they’ll use up a lot more power and resources from its own components.
  • From time to time, this can lead them to have hardware faults such as disk failures, overheating from faulty fans or chip creek (components such as memory cards displaced by heat).
  • These noisy machines are usually located in the server room, stacked on a rack next to a number of other servers, requiring a considerable amount of space and power.

With the problems given above, here’s how virtual servers can help solve these issues, and more:

1. Highly resourceful

Physical servers would generally run with one application, to prevent any issues with running multiple programs at once. This would cause servers to sprawl out in numbers, without using them to their full potential. This is different with virtualized servers, where space isn’t an issue and they can be set separately with the required programs. The recommended resources can also be configured to prevent unnecessary waste of any given resources (disk space, memory. Processor power, etc…) that can be reallocated to another server.

2. Improved Disaster recovery

Virtualization eliminates the need of having replicas of physical servers or disks, with specific model numbers and brands, to carry out data recovery successfully.
A whole site can be replicated easily, being much more affordable in a virtualized environment. Disaster recovery failover can be tested to see if it works, instead of hoping it recovers in a real-life situation or in a disaster recovery testing center.

3. Environmentally Friendly

It goes without saying, less physical servers will mean less power used, as you can pack in many virtual servers in on host machine. This has the added benefit of making more space in a server room. In turn, less power used leads to lower energy costs. This helps reduce a business’ carbon footprint, whilst saving you money.

4. Efficient provisioning and management

You can quickly and easily clone virtual servers, restore or create new ones, at a moment’s notice. You can create virtual machines that will hold legacy applications that may no longer be in support. This can help smooth any server operations that require migration, upgrades, mimic legacy setups, which you can no longer acquire and so forth. Even test labs can be set up to keep things separate from a live environment. It will promote uptime, maintaining business operations as normal.

5. Moving to the Cloud

“The Cloud” may sound like an abstract concept, mainly due to it being a virtual network resource. However, businesses are opting towards new ways of accessing resources; therefore a move to virtualized servers can seem like the next logical step. The Cloud can be either public or private. With the amount of server resources required at a data center to host a Cloud network, a virtual infrastructure would be more sustainable and practical than a physical one.

Virtual servers will soon replace the remaining physical ones out there. It is likely than within five years the shift to a virtual infrastructure will be the norm in many businesses. The top four virtualization vendors to look at are Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware.

For more information on how virtualizing your servers can help save costs and streamline your business, contact your local IT professionals.

Read More
1 2