Month: November 2017

8 Ways to Fight Your Company’s Cyber Insecurities

November 22, 2017 Corie Bogan Leave a comment Agent Menu, The Ping

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, we wanted to give you a few tips on how to keep yourself safe in this holiday season.

According to the Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit (TAU), organizations saw a +20.5% increase in attempted cyberattacks between November and December of 2016. If this trend continues in 2017, organizations should be extra vigilant as these attacks often begin around the Thanksgiving holiday.

What does insecure mean? Insecure means that your network and the data contained on it can be easily accessed without your knowledge by unauthorized people.

What’s your liability? If you’re a business, at a minimum, you have your employee social security numbers on file probably in QuickBooks or some other accounting application. You may also have trade secrets, plans, or account information. This is what the hackers want.

What should I do? There are a few things you can do to make yourself more secure. These things are not complex but they will require some time from you or a member of your staff.

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The Ping: DDE Vulnerability

November 17, 2017 Corie Bogan Leave a comment The Ping

Downloading or receiving emails from unknown sources is a risk that we all know can have dire consequences, but that seemingly innocent Word document is now more of a security risk than ever before. 

It was recently discovered that hackers are starting to take advantage of a unique security flaw to gain access to your computer. Previously they would do this by sending you Word documents that contain what are known as “macros.” When enabled, malicious macros can download viruses directly to your machine. Since Microsoft began issuing security warnings for macros, hackers have now found ways to abuse DDE, or Dynamic Data Exchange. DDE is a process that Microsoft uses to share data between applications. For example, Mail Merge can take data from an Excel document and insert it into a Word document. However, it also turns out that hackers can use DDE to send silent download commands in the background of your computer.

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