Step 1: Attackers compromise work-from-home users.
Step 2: They gain access to their company.
Step 3: They bite into the company to discover what’s inside.

There are so many work from home users; this is a target-rich environment.

1. You must harden remote users’ systems against attacks. Secure their connections.
2. When possible, issue laptops, so your IT team has more control over your remote users’ security.
3. Implement user training and phish testing. Please say if you’d like us to provide phish testing and online training for your users. We do all the work so your IT teams can focus on their other tasks.

Please forward this to your friends so they realize their remote users must be more secure than ever, and attackers target them indiscriminately.

The post Your Work From Home Users are Like a Box of Chocolates appeared first on Foster Institute.

To help prevent an attacker logging into your Zoom account, enable two-step login. Once activated, then when you log in, you’ll enter your password along with a separate numerical code. Rather than sending the code as a text message, Zoom uses a more secure approach and requires you to use a passcode generator app. To configure two-step login, go into your account settings. Scroll down until you see the word Admin in the left-hand column, click on Advanced and then click the security option. Scroll down the main window until you see Sign in with Two-Factor Authentication. Enable the option. Sign out of Zoom and sign back in to complete the installation. Follow the prompts to associate your authentication app with Zoom.

When you schedule a meeting, for Meeting ID setting, select Generate Automatically. I’ll explain why soon, know that you need to keep your Personal Meeting ID private except for a few people you trust.

Zoom permits you to choose whether or not to require passwords for your meetings. In most cases, you should require a password. As long as someone gets the meeting notice you send them, they won’t even need the password because the password gets imbedded into the meeting invitation. However, embedding the passphrase inside the invitation exposes you to a risk. If an unauthorized person obtains the invitation, they too can authenticate to your meeting without needing to know the password.

One of the best security features is a tool called Waiting Room. Tomorrow’s tool will show how to set it up quickly. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to receive the links for a powerful experience tomorrow and a concise video on Monday morning.

The post Make your Zoom Secure appeared first on Foster Institute.

Regular backups, including file backups, can do a great job of protecting your documents, pictures, and other files. But a full restore of a computer after an attack can take a very long time, and often requires you to reset the computer to factory defaults and spend hours reloading your programs.

If you need to restore after an attack, restoring an entire image is much faster than starting a re-installation from scratch. Disk images are a one-to-one copy of everything on your computer’s internal hard drive. Most often, you will replicate your drives to an external USB hard drive.

Image backup tools include Shadow Protect Desktop from Storage Craft, and Acronis True Image. For Macs, use Carbon Copy Cloner.

Keep using whatever backup method you already use for backup too. Image backup is an addition, not a replacement.

Please forward this to everyone you know who would like to be able to recover their computer quickly in the event of a ransomware attack.

The post Recover Quickly if Ransomware Attacks at Remote Worker and Home Computers appeared first on Foster Institute.