Blog - Page 105 of 122

Cryptowall Becoming The Most Destructive Malware of 2014

Network, Office IT, Securitycryptowall, malware, securityOphtek, LLC

Nov 2014

Cryptowall, Cryptolocker and Cryptodefence; all malware looking to hold your computer ransom. Here’s what you need to know about these viruses.

Cryptowall is one of the worst malwares out there that can maliciously encrypt your network and system files, holding them ransom in exchange for a Bitcoin payment. Typical Bitcoin payments can vary between $500 to $1000. Since there’s many hacker groups in existence in the wilderness, Cryptowall has evolved from Cryptolocker to practically do the same thing. And to confuse matters even more, there’s another variant like Cryptowall known as Cryptodefense.

The ransom message from a Cryptowall infection

Cryptowall in a nutshell

Cryptowall works by using encryption to change all of your network files, making them unreadable.
It affects Windows XP to Windows 8 Operating Systems.
It also cleverly deletes Shadow Volume Copies to stop any admins from restoring encrypted files.
Only the attacker holds the key to decrypt the files that makes them readable again.
The ransom increases after 7 days to nearly double the amount and is only payable with Bitcoin.

With this angle of attack, it’s no wonder why hackers are using this hostile method to forcibly siphon Bitcoin payment from their prey.

Examples of attacks

Durham Police

One prime example that has gained recent media coverage is Durham town police in New Hampshire. As a typical response from any law enforcement agency, the police refused to pay the ransom to cooperate with the cyber criminals.
It had impacted 1500 of their own computers, with most of their police e-mail system, spreadsheets and word processing functions being affected. It had bypassed their spam and AV filters, and was masked as an attachment in an email.
The danger lies in that the police receive plenty of emails with attachments to notify them of complaints such as potholes from residents, which of course, aren’t to be ignored. For this very reason an infected email attachment was opened, executed and it ran through the system.
Fortunately for them, they were able to stop the attack from spreading to other company functions and police networks in other towns by isolating their network and recouping their system from offline back-ups.

Business Decisions

Another example of an attack came from a client of Stu Sjourwerman’s security training firm knowB4. The attack happened after an administrator opened an infected file, which ran through onto their 7 mapped server drives, encrypting all 75 GB of data held there.

There were many negative factors against them:

Firstly, they had unverified backups, which would take time to see whether they worked or not, a risk which would be costly to the time in terms of extended downtime with no guarantee of a successful restore.
Secondly, setting up a Bitcoin account involves a lengthy process to set up with society checks that can take days to complete.
In desperation with shortening their downtime, they decided to pay the ransom. It was a business decision, meaning either losing out $500 in Bitcoin or thousands for operation downtime.
The problem was, they didn’t have the Bitcoin to pay the ransom.

The turning point:

Luckily, they had sought Stu Sjourwerman’s help, where he had Bitcoins at hand, ready for such an event like this one.
This company’s IT admins had, prior to this event, taken a security awareness course lead by ex- hacker Kevin Mitnick and with Stu Sjourwerman.
Contrary to the police case, this company had taken the advice from the course, and with Stu Sjourwerman’s Bitcoins, they managed to pay the ransom to avoid further downtime.
In the end they did recover their files; however there was corruption to one of their databases, which all in all took another painstaking 18 hours to return to normal.

Not all cases end well and not all ransoms release the files as promised. It’s really at the discretion the criminal cyber gangs controlling the attack.

For more ways to strengthen your office security and IT policy enforcement, contact your local IT professionals.

How Reliable is your Hard Drive?

Uncategorizedbackup, hard drives, storageOphtek, LLC

Nov 2014

Your hard drive contains irreplaceable data, pictures and personal info. A new Backblaze study gives us insight on the most reliable hard drives out there.

We’ve compiled a summary based on Backblaze’s new findings on hard drive reliability, covering the brands that tend to fail the most and how often it has been reported.

Backblaze, a backup service provider, has data centers that hold more than 100 petabytes of data on over 34,000 drives, impressive right? They’ve done all the hard work in testing a wide range of hard drives, some of which have failed and others that have remained in full working order.

They began documenting their study in January 2014 and have since updated their observations.

Here is a summary of what you need to know:

The worst failing drives have been the 3 TB Western Digital and the 3 TB Seagate. This has been tested from 3,846 Seagate hard drives with an average age of 1.9 years and an initial 9% annual failure rate, which is now up to 15%. From the 776 Western Digital hard disks tested, the report shows that they have averaged 0.5 years in lifespan and had an annual failure rate of 4%, which has increased to 7%.
Interestingly, the HGST drives (previously branded as Hitachi) have been the most reliable brand with their annual failure rate averaging around 1% out of over 1600 tested hard drives in the datacenter.
Despite Seagate and Western Digital having a poor reliability record compared to the HGST drives, the reliability on these two problematic brands have continued to perform better with the Seagate 1.5TB and 4TB sized drives, along with the 1 TB Western Digital drives.
Western Digital and Seagate’s 3 TB drives continue to be the worst performers. One assumption could be that these drives may buckle easily under a datacenter environment. Another possibility could be due to a difference in how they run within a drive farming setup (using enterprise drives) as opposed to removing them from external USB hubs.
From their extensive testing, Backblaze noted that the standard external USB drives, such as Seagate’s 3TB (priced at around $100 for consumers), performed just slightly better than enterprise drives which are over double the price!
There’s also a big difference between different hard drive models and their failure rates. Seagate’s Barracuda range has two different 3 TB drives, with Barracuda XT performing nearly three times as well as the struggling Barracuda 7200.14 model, with a 15.7% annual fail rate.
The same goes for Seagate’s 1.5 TB drives, such as the Barracuda LP, performing significantly better as a hard drive with an annual failure rate of 9.6% compared to the Barracuda 7200.11, which has a 25% fail rate.

Overall conclusion

When it comes to looking for a reliable hard drive, especially those that are of 1.5 TB and 3 TB capacities, we have a clear winner and that is the HGST brand. One thing is clear; there’s no hard disk that is ever 100% fail proof, even the HGST drives have been noted to fail at times. The highest HGST annual fail rate of 1.4%, from over a thousand tested hard disks, is still a very impressive record.

Regardless of your hard drive brand, model and style, it is extremely important to replicate and backup your data on a regular basis, as you never know when a hard drive will fail.

We hope that Seagate and Western Digital improve their current 1.5 and 3 TB drives and pay attention to this continued study. Although most drives will come with a 3 year warranty, in the event of a hard disk failing, this shouldn’t be much of a financial setback to their customers.

For more information on storage for your office or home based business, contact your local IT professionals.

Limitations of a Gigabit Network

Network, Office ITgigabit, networkOphtek, LLC

Oct 2014

You’ve upgraded to a gigabit network and you already notice a big speed boost. Here are the limitation of a gigabit network you should know about.

What is a Gigabit Network?

Wired Gigabit networks have far superseded the days when Ethernet or its successor, Fast Ethernet, were employed to deliver 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps over a network. However, the next best thing, which has been around for over a decade now, is Gigabit, running at 1000 Mbps or 1 Gigabit over many networks.

Bearing this in mind, what would be the first thing you’d think of when you hear of a “Gigabit network”? You may associate Gigabit networks with large corporate companies who can afford to implement this “expensive” technology in order to gain faster connections, along with all the “complex” equipment needed to support such requirements. The truth is, it was expensive when it was first introduced into the market, however the price has eventually dropped so that small businesses and home users alike can benefit from it.

In a previous article, we explained the benefits of upgrading to a gigabit network at your home or office. Here are some points you should keep in mind.

Limitations of a Gigabit Network

It doesn’t help to speed up internet connection

Gigabit networks are designed to help speed up the transfer rate of data between one device, desktop or server, to another, within an internal network. Whoever your broadband provider is, they’d be the ones who’ll determine and set your Internet connection speed. This is why a Gigabit network will leave this area unaffected until services like Google Fiber are widely available. Just think of the Internet as connecting to an external source from your desktop, phone or device.

Your gigabit networks will not run at 1000 Mbps for everything

Since resources are shared, there are many things running on your network that will be utilizing pieces of that 1000 Mbps gigabit speed. Speedier performances will however be very noticeable compared to a 100 Mbps network. Also, note that many wireless devices still haven’t reached gigabit speeds, although we are getting there.

Is all of your equipment gigabit capable?

Have you confirmed that all of the equipment on your network is capable or running at your new gigabit speed? Having a gigabit router and the correct Cat 6 cabling is enough to get you up to gigabit speeds only for devices that support Gigabit. It won’t break the bank to get them up to speed though. For instance you can buy $15 switches, $20 routers with Wi-Fi, $0.50 cables, and even PCI gigabit network cards to install on old computers for around $10-25, making the possibility of running a Gigabit network an affordable reality!

For more advice on setting up a gigabit network in your office or home, contact your local IT professionals.

Why You Need a Gigabit Network

Network, Office ITgigabit, networkOphtek, LLC

Oct 2014

Whether at home or in the office, the low cost and huge benefit of running a gigabit network is too good to pass up. Here’s what you need to know.

What is a Gigabit Network?

Let’s start with what a network, let alone gigabit network means in the context of your office or home. The network is how all of your computers, wifi/wired printers, tablets and even TVs talk to each other.

The speed at which your devices talk to each other is determined by your network equipment such as your wireless router and network cables connecting all of your devices to the router. Having equipment and cabling capable of gigabit speeds means you are running 10 times faster than traditional networking equipment often running at 10 or 100mbit speeds.

Benefits of a Gigabit network

Google fiber could be coming to you
That’s right, gigabit internet could well be accessible to you, helping your network perform better, along with improved traffic flow to better avoid bottle necks.
Faster file transfer rates and program load times
Up to ten times the speed to help increase communications between your office computers for file sharing, and loading programs over the network. It can also, for instance, considerably reduce the waiting time for backups to complete, compared to the average standard Ethernet rate of 12.5 Mbps.
Your equipment may already be compatible
If your equipment is fairly new, the chances are that it may support running on a Gigabit connection. Equipment such as desktops, LAN switches, cables, and so forth, all need to be able to run 1000 Mbps and have ports that support this too. Category 5e or 6 cables are the best to use in a Gigabit network.
Old switches/ routers can still work on a Gigabit network
What’s good is that you don’t need to throw your existing switch/router away. You can obtain a standalone gigabit-enabled switch, like a Netgear that can cost around $40, and connect it up your old switch or router.For the low price of setting up a Gigabit network it’s definitely worth the upgrade. Anything that streamlines access to applications, facilitates smooth daily backup operations, or allows access to any shared resource in the company is going to benefit everyone.

For more advice on setting up a gigabit network in your office or home, contact your local IT professionals.

Is the Cloud Secure?

Internet, Network, Office IT, Office Networkcloud, secureOphtek, LLC

Oct 2014

If you own a computer, chances are you are using a cloud service that holds your data. What exactly is the cloud and is the cloud secure?

What is the cloud?

At a high level putting your data or information on to the cloud means storing your stuff on someone else’s hardware. What is the benefit of storing information on someone else’s computers when your computers are already storing your data?

This is where the cloud business model comes in to play. Keeping your information on someone else’s hardware, whether it’s your phone contacts, your computer backup or your business files and folders, allows you to access your information from virtually anywhere and to share it with virtually anyone.

Is the cloud secure?

The downside to having your data accessible from anywhere in the world is that it must be accessible from anywhere in the world. Most cloud service companies will provide a website or an application on your phone or computer to get to your data.

These websites and applications are accessible by anyone over the internet and are a prime target for criminals and hackers to break in to. A recent example of this is the iCloud vulnerability which gave criminals access to private photos and videos of celebrities.

Having your cloud accounts stolen can be done by criminals either attacking the cloud website like the iCloud example above or my infecting your PC and stealing account login information.

How can you protect yourself?

Unfortunately there isn’t much an individual can do to ensure companies are fixing bugs and vulnerabilities in their internet facing cloud websites and applications. It is important to watch for announcements from cloud services you use about whether they’ve had a recent breach.

As an end user, there are some basic steps you can take to protect yourself on a regular basis:

Onsite PC Solution managed services clients receive regular updates, patching, scanning and 24/7 monitoring against vulnerabilities which could lead to a data breach.

For more information about securing your business data and choosing a reliable cloud service for your business needs, contact your local IT professionals.

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