What if your password manager is infiltrated by attackers? The concern that attackers may steal your passwords is eclipsed by the concern that attackers might use the password manager to gain access and take control of your network.

What if attackers spread viruses into your computer, using your favorite music program? Or a game? Or an add-on for your browser?

Attackers already infected the program called C-Cleaner, used by millions. Unfortunately, this tool became a powerful attack tool when attackers poisoned the update server.

As another example, some people believe that there is evidence that Kaspersky anti-virus software has been used to infiltrate computers.

By their nature, anti-virus programs need to have access to the deepest parts of computers in order to function properly. That makes them an appealing target for attackers. When an attacker can take over an antivirus program, of any brand, the attacker will have the same deep access to the victim’s computer.

Some people use an add-on program to help check their grammar in documents. This week, a patch was released to fix a bug that made it possible for attackers to access users’ private documents. Although the problem was fixed quickly once discovered, how much sensitive data was stolen before the discovery?

Talk to your IT Professionals and remove all software that is not essential to your business. Each program is a potential vector for attackers. If you need a program, keep it. The concern is that a program can be used as a pathway into your organization’s sensitive information, and to even give attackers the ability to take full control of your network.

Please forward this to your friends so they can re-think having non-essential programs installed on their network. The problem, of attackers using trusted programs to access networks, is trending in 2018 and is a growing threat to the security of all organizations.

The post When Trusted Programs get Hacked: An Attacker May Be Putting Germs on Your Toothbrush appeared first on Foster Institute.

An example tool that can help protect against users opening or clicking in an email is Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection. At least one of our clients use this tool and now we do too.  There are similar solutions that may work better in your situation.

Here’s what the tools do: When an inbound email contains one or more links and a user clicks, Mimecast will intercept the link and attempt to determine if the link goes to a website that is known to be malicious. If it is a known bad site, the click is blocked and the user receives a message. Your existing firewall (if you have the web content filtering feature enabled) may provide you with similar protection already for users inside your office, but not always for users who are travelling or working from home.

These tools scan email attachments in an effort to detect malicious code in the attachments. Your existing spam filtering mechanism may offer this feature.

Mimecast will also block email messages that seem to be from impostors. When a user receives an email that appears to be from someone impersonating the boss, requesting a wire transfer, the service will warn the user to be careful.

While there are no guarantees this kind of tool will stop an email phishing attack, any kind of protection is a welcomed improvement. Ask whomever is providing your anti-spam solution if they offer an add-on solution similar to Mimecast’s Targeted Threat Protection.

Please forward this to everyone you know who is concerned about their users clicking a link in an email message, opening an infected attachment, or responding to an email asking them to transfer money.

The post E-Mail Protection Solution appeared first on Foster Institute.

Note: This blog is written for non-technical executives. So, if this sounds too technical, that’s fine, just skip the rest and know your computers can, in theory, be protected even when a user opens a malicious attachment or downloads a malicious file.

The experience would be that, when a user needs to open five PDF documents, you could temporarily give that user five new computers. One computer to use for each opened attachment or downloaded document.

If one of the files contains ransomware, the infection would be isolated to just one of the computers, and would not affect the user’s normal computer, nor your network.

Instead of you needing to buy more computers to loan to your team members, what happens is that a brand new tiny Windows Operating System gets created automatically, for each attached or downloaded file.

A product called Bromium is designed to do this, and Microsoft has something more basic called WDAG. Bromium only sold to companies with 500 or more computers, but will be offering services to smaller companies, and is even shipping free on some laptops soon. Your IT professionals can get a free copy now at Bromium dot com forward slash freebeta to experiment with this micro virtualization.

There was so much to see at the RSA Security convention last week. I’ll be sharing some of the more interesting technologies with you over the next few weeks.

We do not receive any kind of compensation for mentioning products. Nor are we endorsing the products. It just helps for you to hear about these neat technologies.

Please forward this to your friends who are concerned about users opening attachments and downloaded files.

The post Protect Against Bad Attachments and Employee Downloads appeared first on Foster Institute.