Ransomeware!! And how to protect yourselves.

After attending Business in Oxford BIO2017 last Thursday, one of the seminars was rather poignant as they stressed the emphasis on how to protect your business from so called 'ransomware'! Something that I certainly had not heard about before but found rather frightening as I asked many questions after the talk. Then Friday saw a strike that affected NHS and several hundred thousand computers around the world and reality kind of struck hard. What about us? How would we cope? and Are we really protected and updated?

Fortunately we are very lucky to have a skilled adviser who supports our systems and has kindly put together a list of do's and don'ts that I really wished to share.

It seems the most vulnerable systems on any network are those running Windows XP.

Win 7 and Win 10 machines should be OK IF running latest updates and encryption.

Our technical adviser suggests:

1. Make sure all PCs are up to date (including the XP machines where there may be one last MS Patch for this latest thing even though XP Is no longer officially supported by MS).

1a. Ideally make sure all are running anti-virus software and firewall is on.

2. On Win 7 and Win 10 machines turn 'BitLocker' ON (encryption).

3. Allow only your machine to have Admin or Administrator log-in.

4. Have a back-up. Have another back-up taken periodically (say monthly) onto a disk that is NOT connected to the network. The Cloud is OK for this.

5. Consider removing any machines that are not running Win 7 or Win 10 from the network and use them only standalone connecting only removable drives etc to them. Though beware of any removable media you receive even if from a trusted source...

Removable media should be automatically scanned for malware when it is introduced to any system.

The removable media policy could also require that any media brought into the organisation is scanned for malicious content by a standalone machine before any data transfer takes place.

6. Unistall any software such as Adobe Flash or Java that you no longer use.

Patches to check you have:

• Deploy patch MS17-010:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010 - Critical

technet.microsoft.com

This security update resolves vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows. The most severe of the vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if an attacker ...

• A new patch has been made available for legacy platforms, and is available here:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer-guidance-for-wannacrypt-attacks

Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt attacks

blogs.technet.microsoft.com

Microsoft solution available to protect additional products Today many of our customers around the world and the critical systems they depend on were victims of malicious “WannaCrypt” software. Seeing businesses and individuals affected by cyberattacks, such as the ones reported today, was painful. Microsoft worked throughout the day to ensure we understood the attack and...