Criminal Hacks Are Increasing At An Alarming Rate

Our Labor Day holiday was shattered by the news that a series of data breaches and hacks occurred stealing personal and financial information. Even Hollywood is feeling the pain as nude celebrity photos started showing up on the internet followed by the news that credit and debit card information were stolen from Home Depot systems.

News on the internet is buzzing with data breach stories. This week we also learned that:

• North Korea is using foreign bases to launch cyber-attacks according to Hewlett Packard
• JP Morgan suffered another breach impacting its UCard users
• An unnamed industrial software company’s website suffered a “watering hole” attack, delivering malware to victims’ systems, and sending the data to criminal servers
• Namecheap, a hosting provider, was hacked stealing user names and passwords thanks to Russian criminals that recently disclosed 1.2 billion credentials to criminal forums

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service announced last month that over 1,000 Enterprise networks, and small-to-medium size businesses’ point-of-Sale devices may be infected, putting their customers at risk. The malware infecting these systems is the same malware thought to be responsible for the Target, SuperValue, and UPS breaches.

Here’s a sobering thought — it’s only Wednesday; we still have the rest of the week!

 Stealing financial and personal information is big business for criminal enterprises who net millions of dollars selling credit card numbers, banking credentials, and apparently nude celebrity photos. No one is safe, whether you’re an individual, multi-billion dollar company, or a small business. EVERYONE IS A TARGET AND SMALL BUSINESSES ARE PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE!

Individuals and companies of all sizes must take responsibility for their own security. Use common sense and security systems to make it hard for criminals to steal your personal and company information:

• Institute a strict password policy. Use long passwords with a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. Never use one password for all systems and change them often.
• Take email security seriously. Email is the number 1 method of delivering malware.
• Educate your staff on social engineering scams — how to recognize and avoid them.
• Immediately institute a clean desk policy at your office.
• If you’re a business, have your systems managed by an IT Managed Services Provider (MSP). Network monitoring and maintenance as well as fast response to issues are key to security.

XSolutions is a Managed Services Provider (MSP) and provides 24/7/365 remote monitoring, scheduled workstation and server maintenance, Help Desk Services, Cloud & Hosted Services, Backup/Disaster Recovery, and Software Development. Call us at (845) 362-9675 and see how we can help your company.