Every program that you install on your computer is a potential security risk.

CCleaner may be installed on your computers, right now, by well meaning, qualified, IT professionals who care about you and your organization. It is a powerful tool with many beneficial features. Yet it has been hacked.

It will not help you to invest energy being angry at your in-house, or outsourced, IT professionals, or to be angry at the developer of CCleaner. They mean well and are using their skills to protect you and your company. CCleaner has undoubtedly added a great deal of value to the world by speeding up computers and removing malware. At some point, IT professionals have to trust that some programs are secure.

But their trust is exactly what attackers are counting on.

What you, as an executive, must do is to ask your IT team for a list of all programs installed on your network. Ask IT to uninstall all programs, that you, with their input, decide are not absolutely essential for you to use to serve your employees and customers. Do not burden them with making that decision on their own.

You owe that to your customers who trust you with their information.

You may decide to stick to using programs from well known and vetted companies, although that is no guarantee that the program is safe. Any program that is installed by millions of users becomes a target for attackers to use as a vector into your organization’s computers.

If you use CCleaner, uninstall it. Know that some of your data, perhaps whole computers, have been compromised. You can read their official announcement here: https://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=48869

Know that uninstalling software does not remove the malicious code imbedded in your computer. And don’t count on your anti-virus to find the code. Attackers know how to hide malware from anti-virus programs. The best thing to do would be to rebuild the computers from scratch. Hackers are counting on the fact that your IT Pros do not have time to reload each computer. Ask your IT Pros if they have time. Either free up some of their time so they can perform the reload, or bring in an outsourced company to help, or choose to accept the risk and go on. That’s a decision for the executives to make. Using a technology called VDI makes the reinstallation process much easier.

If you want to continue to use CCleaner, if there is an executive level decision that the risk is worth the benefit, then you can ask IT to re-install the newest version.

Forward this to every executive you know. Tell them about this crisis, and how they must be involved in identifying all non-essential programs, so that IT can uninstall them.

The post Your Software, such as CCleaner, May Have Backdoors appeared first on Foster Institute.

To save you time, below are shortcuts that worked on Saturday. Freeze all 4; go to all 4 sites:

Experian (888) 397-3742
https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html

TransUnion LLC – To Freeze: (888) 909-8872
https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze

Equifax Information Services, LLC (800) 685-1111
https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/

Innovis – To Freeze: (800) 540-2505
https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze

The post Credit Monitoring is Not Enough – You Must Place Credit Freezes to Protect Yourself appeared first on Foster Institute.

Data stolen may include contact information, dates of birth, driver’s license information, and Social Security numbers. Attackers can make money selling the information to people who could steal your identity and take out loans in your name.

Place a credit freeze on your credit report. To do so, contact all four: Experian, Innovis, Trans Union, and, you guessed it, Equifax. In total, you’ll spend less than $75 to place the freeze.

A credit freeze stops people for gaining access to your credit report. It is difficult for an imposter to borrow money if a lender cannot check a credit report first.

Remember, credit monitoring, though good, sometimes only catches bad things when it is too late.

A security freeze is more effective, and lasts longer, than a fraud alert.

Additionally, watch out for anything odd or abnormal on your bank statements. Download your credit reports every quarter to see what is on them. One way to see your credit reports is to use a service such as annualcreditreport dot com

The FTC gives suggestions about avoiding and handling identity theft at consumer.ftc dot gov/features/feature-0014-identity-theft

Equifax has set up a website equifaxsecurity2017 dot com for people to see if their information was part of the breach. However, many people have been experiencing problems with that website.

Executives – FYI: Reports say that the attack did not result from social engineering. In other words, nobody clicked a bad link in an email. The attackers got in because an Equifax website was insecure. Have you had someone check the security of your website lately? If your site simply displays static information, you are at a much lower risk than if your site has a place for someone to login and/or look up information via your site.

Reports say that the breach may have happened as early as May, and Equifax discovered the breach on July 29. The time between when attackers compromise a system, and when it is discovered, is called dwell time. The best thing to do is to stop hackers from getting in to begin with. Keep security a top priority at your organization! The attackers are counting on you to overlook important steps.

Please forward this to anyone you care about…

The post What You Need to Do to Protect Yourself after the Equifax Breach appeared first on Foster Institute.

Using plain letters is enough; numbers and symbols are optional.

Passwords need to be long, at least 8 characters. 16 or more is better.

You don’t have to reset passwords unless you suspect a data breach. Wow!

However, passwords cannot match a database of stolen or easy to guess passwords. And, your login mechanism has to have a way to verify that.

That’s the basic gist. You can read the details in the NIST Special Publication 800-63 at https://pages.nist dot gov/800-63-3/sp800-63-3.html It covers secret questions, two step login, etc.

Now, hopefully PCI and other standards will update their rules too.

Please forward this to anyone who is sick of complicated passwords and having to change them every 90 days.

The post Make Life Easier – Go Back to Easy Passwords appeared first on Foster Institute.

Be sure the “automatic update” feature is turned on in Windows and in Mac OS. Students must have the critical security patches installed to dramatically increase security. They’ll need to patch their browsers separately.

Uninstall all programs that they don’t think they will use. Start with the programs that are easy to recognize and skip the rest for now. Each program is a potential toe-hold for an attacker to gain access to a system. Worst case, if they delete something now that they need later, they can re-install it. In particular, remove Java and Flash. These are two tools that are frequently hacked and may be unnecessary. If a student finds they need either, he or she can reinstall them with the newest version. Make sure they get Java only from java dot com and Flash from get.adobe dot com/flashplayer/

Make sure they make their user account a “standard user” on their computer. This helps block attackers. Steps for Windows and Mac: 1) Create a new user 2) promote that user to be a local administrator 3) Demote your account to a standard user and use your own account.

Turn on two-step verifications on all the websites they visit. The setting is usually in the security settings of the website.

They need to keep their computer physically secure. Someone could access their files, social media, and e-mail accounts easily and without their knowledge. Passwords aren’t that helpful. It is usually trivial to bypass passwords on computers once an attacker gains physical access to a computer.

And though they may not heed this last step, it is a really good idea to avoid connoting to Wi-Fi services at school, coffee shops, etc. It is better if they use their phone or personal hot-spot to connect their computer to the Internet when they need to. The phone charges may be lower than you expect, especially if you call your phone provider and check about new data plan options.

Please forward this to your friends who have students; it can help prevent some big heartaches.

The post Moms, Dads, and Friends: Take 7 Steps to Secure Your Students’ Computers appeared first on Foster Institute.

If you will be in Vegas, leave your laptop and phone at home – lest you end up on the infamous wall of shame for being hacked. The website is defcon dot org

The post Hacker Convention Starts Later This Week appeared first on Foster Institute.

With computers, you can be up and running ASAP. Unless there is something broken with the computer’s hardware, a broken computer can be revived in just a few minutes.

In order for this to happen, ask your IT department (if they haven’t already) to create a golden image.

First they will set up a computer and configure it exactly the way it needs to be for your business – and you could do this for home computers too. Second, make an image backup of the computer. Recommended tools are below.

Now, you have a golden image, configured in the way you like with all the right software installed, etc., that can be restored to a computer to reset the computer to be like new again.

From now on, whenever you suspect that a computer is infected with a virus, has been hacked, or is just malfunctioning in general, do not troubleshoot it. Dump a golden image back onto the computer and refresh it to be like new.

Note: All the data will be overwritten when you restore the image. So, for personal computers, be sure to back up the data prior to restoring an image. At the office, all users store their data files on servers, not on workstations, right?

You may find that your IT team can create a single golden image that can be used on different models of computers, or they may need to make separate images for each model. If you use a technology called VDI, this is even easier. VDI is a different topic though.

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

Please forward this to everyone you know who troubleshoots a computer if it is acting up. There is another way, and troubleshooting may not be able to completely remove a virus if the computer is infected anyway.

The post Fix A Computer in Minutes and It Works Almost Every Time 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.

Sir Michael Fallon, the UK’s defense secretary, warned attackers that the UK will hunt them down, and respond not just in cyber-space, but also using air, land, and sea forces.

Imagine soldiers, drones, and even missiles directed at anyone the UK identifies as a cyber-criminal.

Will attackers receive this as a deterrent? Or will attackers respond: “You realize, of course… This means war!” (Bugs Bunny cartoons).

You can read more details at www.bbc dot com/news/uk-politics-40423164

The post The UK Is Preparing to Attack Hackers with Army, Navy and Air Force. appeared first on Foster Institute.

1. Apply the most recent security patches including the ones for Flash and Java.
2. Use click-to-play in your browsers to stop them from automatically running scripts.
3. Be sure all users are local standard users.

Find more details at https://www.fosterinstitute dot com/blog/patching-10-steps-to-seal-the-holes-in-your-armor/

Please forward this to your friends and business associates so they can be sure that they are protected too.

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