WannaCry and Petya might be one of the top IT search terms this year as they threatened every single business across the globe creating devastating effects on many businesses.
The scale of recent cyber-attacks may have raised awareness of cybersecurity or vulnerability management for major business entities – which might be the only “positive impact”. However, many small businesses remain calm even if hackers generally target larger companies. In fact, it is common for hackers to hack smaller businesses through its weakest link, and then further hack the larger ones, if possible, through their network. In other words, every company might be involved.
Since the industry is currently reeling from weaponized exploit kits, there are ways for small businesses to prevent another WannaCry or Petya from taking their precious data hostage.
- Use application whitelisting to protect computers and networks from potentially harmful applications or unapproved programs from being installed.
- Restrict administrative privileges to operating systems and applications based on user roles and responsibilities.
- Patch operating systems and applications such as Flash, web browsers, Microsoft Office, Java PDF viewers, etc.
- Don’t allow your servers to initiate connections with the internet (if possible)
- Redesign your network under segmentation and isolation to avoid wide-spreading infection from one machine
You will never know how terrible it would be until you’re the victim. Ask your IT engineer to follow up with network updates and planning, and to enhance vulnerability management. Or contact Uniserve today to see what we can help you with IT.
Original Source: http://buff.ly/2tylojn
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