Your Computer Can Make You Money?
Certainly you’ve heard of cryptocurrency, which is a type of currency that is “mined” from a computer. The most common cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is generated by computers that crunch through numbers. Some organizations have warehouses full of high-end servers that are constantly mining for Bitcoin. The average computer can’t really handle this task, but with enough of them, hackers can start to receive a considerable sum.

Why Is This Dangerous?
Cryptomining is dangerous particularly because of how intensive the process is. It can take a toll on the average device if it’s left unchecked. As previously stated, it takes an exceptionally powerful machine to effectively mine cryptocurrency. This causes the device to experience an abnormal amount of wear and tear. Over time, you’ll notice that your device will start to decrease in efficiency and slow down.

Other ways that this might affect a business is through the immediate costs associated with cryptomining affecting your hardware. You might notice an abnormally high electricity bill from a server being influenced by cryptomining, or a cloud-based service working too slowly. Either way, the end result is a negative effect for either your employees or your customers.

How You Can Protect Your Business
If you’re looking for cryptomining on your network, be sure to keep an eye out for suspicious network activity. Since the malware will be sending information over a connection, you’ll be able to identify suspicious activity during times when there shouldn’t be as much activity on your network. In this particular case, the data being sent is small, making it difficult to detect for businesses that transmit a lot of data.

Security professionals are turning toward machine learning to detect and eliminate cryptomining troubles on networks. Machine learning can analyze a network’s traffic for the telltale signs of cryptomining software. Another method is to use a SIEM solution that gives network administrators the power to discover consistent or repetitive issues from potential malware.

To keep your business safe from the looming threat of cryptojacking, you should implement measures to ensure all common methods of attack are covered, including spam, antivirus, content filters, and firewalls. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

The Basics: Viruses and Malware
Your computer depends on software to run, whether it’s the operating system or the software solutions on the device itself. Viruses are created to make changes to this code, and the results can vary in scope and scale. They can go from being minor annoyances to major time wasters. Malware is a bit more dangerous in scope. It stands for “malicious software,” and its intentions are right in the name. Hackers develop malware for various purposes, but for the most part, it’s with the intention of stealing, altering, or destroying data, depending on what nefarious plot the hacker is using it for.

The More Dangerous: Ransomware and Spyware
There are other more specialized types of malware that are designed for specific purposes. Ransomware, for instance, is designed to extort money from unsuspecting victims. It encrypts files located on the infected device, only decrypting them when a ransom has been paid to the hacker responsible. These kinds of threats are quite popular with hackers as they can be used to target a considerable number of victims in a short amount of time. Spyware is also a popular threat that allows hackers to steal information in a covert manner through various means, including backdoor infiltrations, keyloggers, and so much more. This is particularly dangerous to your business’ intellectual property.

The Vehicle: Spam and Phishing Attacks
Cybersecurity threats are the most dangerous when they can be concealed. After all, you never hear in the news about how a brute-force attack exposed millions of health records or passwords to the world. No, the most devastating data breaches are typically those that occur over an extended period of time, shielded from the eyes of security professionals and network administrators. Spam and phishing attacks that deceive users into clicking on links or downloading suspicious files play a key role in allowing threats into a network. It’s more important than ever before to be cautious while online, as there is no telling who might try to trick you into exposing your network to threats.

Protect Your Business with Proactive Tools and Best Practices
Thankfully, while it’s easier for threats to make their way through your defenses, the defenses put into place by businesses are much more substantial than in previous years. A Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution is easily the most comprehensive security tool on the market today, combining well-known methods of cybersecurity into an easy and accessible package. This includes a firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filter to minimize the chances of threats manifesting on your network in the first place, as well as solutions to mitigate threats that do make it through your defenses. This can be further augmented through industry best practices that dictate how and when to share data.

To learn more about how your organization can take advantage of security solutions, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

The Good
Let’s start with the resoundingly positive attributes of the Internet. Firstly, it makes life extraordinarily easier. Banking, shopping, and direct communication with other individuals and businesses are all simpler and faster. People can get more done in a shorter amount of time. It makes people smarter by providing them access to a knowledge base unprecedented in human history. It provides the opportunity to connect with like-minded people from anywhere in the world at minimal cost, giving people the ability to do wonderful things for others whom they may have never met. It provides businesses and individuals, alike, the access to better opportunities, more knowledge, and interactions with people that matter to them.

Speaking of business, it has changed things for entrepreneurs precipitously. Data storage and retrieval is faster. Cloud platforms of all types offer software, hardware, security, and development platforms that reduces the enormous capital costs many organizations were spending on their IT. It gives organizations access to a glut of resources, no more important than a growing mobile workforce that is available around the clock, promoting better productivity. It provides the opportunity to streamline all types of work, whether it be reducing face-to-face interactions with your vendors, or utilizing tracking software that helps administrators build more efficient business practices.

The Internet has provided a social outlet to people who didn’t have one. The use of social media has revolutionized the way people share and communicate. Each person has the freedom to do whatever they choose online, and often this results in positive action. Many important groups that have been marginalized for one reason or another are now able to promote their platforms thoroughly.

The Bad
There are some things about the Internet that many people can give or take. In fact, for every benefit listed above, there is a drawback. The easier access to information opens the door for more misinformation. For all the ease of banking, shopping, and communication there are threat actors looking to steal resources and personal information for profit. For every like-minded person that you meet, you meet all manners of Internet trolls and other unattractive people.

Social media has had an amazing amount of influence, but for all the good that it does, it also promotes individual freedom from convention, sure, but also creates what is known as a “toxic mirror” effect. This is the concept of making people feel bad about themselves by constantly being exposed to information that would make them create negative opinions about themselves. The toxic mirror makes anything that isn’t physical, emotional, and mental perfection, ugly and bad.

Beyond the toxic mirror, many people use social media in ways that hurt the people around them. The manifestation of a social persona can often present the opportunity for a user to put out very public misinformation. This break from reality, further muddies people’s ability to properly identify risk, putting them in harmful situations. The Internet is filled with trolls, stalkers, and bullies. These groups are allowed to run rampant, as people don’t have a lot of resources to ward against them. These individuals hide behind their Internet persona, making civil action against them extremely difficult. Cyberbullying, specifically, can cause great harm to people of all ages.

For the business, the Internet is a true double-edged sword. On one hand if you don’t utilize its features, you could be hindering the manner in which you conduct business, since more people are exposed to your business on the Internet than in any other place. A problem with this is that you then have to spend a lot of advertising capital to try and get your business exposed to potential customers. For some businesses this may be advantageous, but for the lion’s share of businesses, it increases the capital that is required without any assurance that it will provide additional sales.

The Ugly
The Internet is actually a pretty dangerous place; and, it’s a lot bigger than people think. While the usable part of the Internet is catalogued by most of the major search engines, there is a massive part of the Internet that is filled to the brim with risky behaviors. The deep web, and more specifically, the dark web, is filled with problematic content. While users can’t just access this part of the Internet, the people that do are often the hackers and dissidents of the world. Some are evil, some just unfortunate, but most of the dark web is filled with a black market that makes available goods and services that the average person has no use for. Murder for hire? Check. Drug catalogues? Check. Hacking resources? Check. It’s essentially an anti-social person’s playground filled with hate, and illegal material. Think of the dark web as a city. It just so happens that some places in that city (like many other cities) are very dangerous, and while you may just find something you can’t find anywhere else, staying far away is a good way to avoid the negatives altogether.

For the business, the ugliest part of the Internet are the countless hacking collectives and individual hackers that are almost constantly trying to gain access to their network. Computer viruses and other malware, including ransomware are such a big threat that businesses spend billions and billions of dollars a year trying to protect themselves and their clients from people looking to steal their data and sell it off.

The Internet is a lot of good to a lot of people, but as more derision, more hate, more criminal behavior, and more strategic subversion happen on the Internet, the more it becomes something it was never intended to be. The saving grace is the hundreds of millions of users that still use the Internet to make their lives, and the lives of people around them, better.

The IT professionals at Coleman Technologies are serious about making others’ lives better. If your business wants to utilize the good and secure itself against the bad and the ugly, contact us today at (604) 513-9428. We can help your organization protect your data and scan the dark web to see if any of your accounts (or your employees’ accounts) were already stolen and leaked on the dark web.

Variants of Ransomware
Unlike other malware threats, ransomware isn’t designed to gain access to a system to steal data outright. Rather, it’s just to convince the user to hand over some cash for the safe return of their data. Businesses struck by ransomware are in danger of losing their data and money completely, as there is no guarantee that the hacker will ever return the data, even if the ransom is paid in full. There are two different types of ransomware--“locker” type ransomware targets the CPU, while “crypto” variants go for the encryption of file systems.

It doesn’t matter which strand you contract. The basic premise is still the same. After the threat is unpackaged and executed on the user’s device or network, it encrypts access to data, processing, or both, and it gives the system its demands in the form of instructions on how to make payment. The user then has to make the decision of whether they actually pay the ransom. If they don’t, there is always the option to restore from a data backup platform, if you have one.

Ransomware is a drastically different kind of malware compared to the more traditional methods of hacking. Unlike malware that wants to keep itself hidden so it can siphon information from a computer or install backdoors, ransomware wants you to know what misfortune has befallen you. Ransomware has grown more common in recent years, and so many strains are now seen in the wild that it’s tough to keep up with. These attacks have targeted municipalities, enterprises, and other organizations, all with the goal of leeching as much money from them as possible.

How Ransomware is Delivered
Ransomware might seem like something created by only the most nefarious hackers, but in reality, it’s spread in much the same way that any other threat would be. Spam messages and targeted email campaigns can initiate a ransomware attack, either through clicking on infected links or downloading suspicious attachments. In these cases, ransomware is typically most effective against businesses that have poor network security practices.

Take spam, for example. There’s no reason your business should be dealing with messages like this on a daily basis. With enterprise-level solutions, they can be outright prevented from even entering your inbox. The same can be said about your employees. With proper training, they shouldn’t be downloading unsolicited attachments or clicking on suspicious links in emails. If you invest some time and resources into proper network security, you can minimize the odds of being infected by ransomware.

The Consequences of Ransomware
The most dangerous aspect of ransomware is the downtime that ensues because of it. If you can’t get your work done due to your files being locked down by ransomware, you’re simply wasting time. The same can be said for any employee on your network. Assuming that the entire network is now encrypted by the ransomware, your whole organization could be left with nothing to do until either a backup is restored or someone hands over the ransom. It’s generally a best practice to not pay the ransom, as there is no guarantee that the hackers on the other end will stay true to their end of the bargain.

Instead, it’s best to take preventative and proactive measures to ensure that ransomware doesn’t become a problem in the first place. A Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution is a great way to keep your network secure from external threats, and employee training can keep influences beyond your direct control (like your employees) from placing your entire business in jeopardy. It’s also imperative that your business have a continuity and redundancy strategy in place, as in a worst-case incident like a ransomware attack, you’ll want to restore affected files and systems from a time before the attack struck.

To learn more about how your organization can stay safe from malware--including ransomware--reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.