Viruses and Other Attacks
There are many different Cyber Attacks on the web that threaten the safety and well being of your Infrastructure and Systems but the most common have to be Viruses and Malware. There are so many its the primary reason its important to have top of the line Anti-Virus that gets updated regularly. Even after you have all your Host Intrusion Protections, Firewalls, Full Disk Encryption, and Anti-Virus up to date, different types of Viruses and Malware can still infiltrate your defenses. Trojans have become the most common Virus attack these days. They used to be purely destructive in nature by downloading a Payload or Executable of some kind to your computer and causing structural damage to your Operating System. Trojans are sometimes used alongside Phishing attacks and other payload based attacks. Some Trojans even send data back to a “Mothership” after so much time to accumulate data for a much larger goal. Phishing occurs when someone pretends to be someone or something they are not in order to gain access to your computer, cause harm, or steal from you. For this fact be very careful what you click on in emails, always examine the sender address to make sure it wasn’t faked or spoofed. This is also why it is very very very dangerous to allow End Users to access their Personal Emails on Company Devices. Training your User Populations on how to spot Phishing is a great way to reduce the risk associated with such attacks. Unless you know how to check a link for its level of danger or risk you don’t really know if the link is malicious or just spam ads. Either way they should not be entertained so try to block such emails before they make it to end user mailboxes and have a policy banning the use of Personal Email on Company Devices. Its safer in the long run for all parties.
Some common Trojans actually take over your Anti-Virus and pretend to be legitimate but the whole time it is migrating system files to temp folders and triggering them as viruses. Other forms of Trojans include DDoS Trojans and even Rootkits. Worms are another form of Malware that have the ability to hope from machine to machine sometimes replicating as they infect devices. This is where Network Intrusion Protection and Prevention come into play to protect your Network and Infrastructure so make sure to have these safeguards in place. The terms Viruses and Malware often get conflated and used interchangeably but honestly they are the exact same thing in all of its forms and intentions. Malware use to be a term that differentiated Viruses that were particularly Malicious in nature but turns out all Viruses are now Malicious in nature and should always be treated with urgency. Bottom line is protect systems because they can quickly become a vessel for harm and damage. Viruses and Malware shouldn’t be a huge concern if security controls are properly in place and up to date but know there is always a risk of bad things happening.
