There has been a significant growth in ransomware attacks in Australia and even other countries where hackers are especially leveraging the Covid-19 outbreak to dupe netizens. According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, by 2021, one business entity will succumb to ransomware attacks every 11 seconds, up from every 14 seconds in 2019.

Ransomware, defined in the simplest terms, is malicious software that secretly seeps into your computer or data center and encrypts some/all data using a unique key that can only be decrypted and accessed using the same key. Attackers then demand a ransom to let you gain access to your data. According to Datto, American cybersecurity and data backup company, ransomware costs businesses more than $75 billion per year.

Some common types of ransomware attacks include:

• Crypto malware gains unauthorized access to IT systems and encrypts valuable data and files, disrupting IT operations. The hacker demands payment to hand over decryption keys.
• Lockers block users and administrators from logging into their systems, blocking access to files and applications. The attacker demands a ransom to grant access and restore systems to normalcy.
• Doxware, also known as extortionware, obtains sensitive information and threatens to publish it online, putting confidential, mission-critical business data at risk. As businesses are responsible for protecting their user data, this situation can disrupt legal compliance.

Most of the ransomware attacks start with a phishing email. A simple click with a link to download a malicious attachment can be the gateway to a successful attack. With the ongoing stress and uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, people are more vulnerable to fall victim to carefully designed phishing attacks.

Amidst rising Coronavirus cases, there has been a significant increase in the ransomware attacks on hospitals and healthcare institutions. However, this doesn’t mean others businesses are safe. Many companies are succumbing to these attacks as many of their employees are working remotely in insecure networks. The coronavirus crisis is impacting business revenues and cash flows already, and a  successful ransomware attack on top of it will impact business continuity drastically.

Use-cases of Toll Group and Epiq Global, among others
Ransomware and related attacks worth about $241 million were reported in Australia alone in 2019, according to a new report. The attacks have continued in 2020, with the Australian logistics company, Toll Group, being hit by a ransomware attack on 31 Jan 2020. The company, with over 40,000 workers, had to shut down, disable and isolate its systems and resort to manual processing of the massive amount of data it deals with daily. On 26 Feb 2020, a ransomware attack impacted Talman Software, which serves 75% of the Australian wool industry. As a result, the whole wool buying and selling system went offline across Australia and New Zealand.

Globally, organizations are focusing on digital transformation initiatives—making them primary targets of ransomware attacks. On 29 Feb 2020, a ransomware attack on legal services giant Epiq Global had quickly spread and affected all computers across their 80 global locations. On 2 Mar 2020, Visser Precision LLC, US-based aerospace, automotive, and industrial parts manufacturer, fell victim to a ransomware attack by the DoppelPaymer group. It affected industrial giants Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Tesla, and SpaceX, among other companies who subcontracted work to Visser Precision LLC.

Paying the ransom doesn’t guarantee recovery, especially if hackers are amateurs. They buy ransomware on the dark web without having the technical proficiency to infect networks, thereby failing to decrypt data.

Mitigating the Risk of Ransomware Attacks
The approaches to mitigation vary from business to business. Some conventional approaches to reducing the risk are:

• Backup business-critical and sensitive data periodically on local machines, removable hard risks, and the cloud
• Segregate your networks and systems so that a successful attack on one subsystem doesn’t transmit to others and mitigates that impact
• Perform necessary software and OS updates to ensure software is up to date and secure enough to mitigate the vulnerabilities
• Review your existing endpoint security solution for its readiness and capability to protect against ransomware attacks. If it’s inadequate, upgrade to a suitable alternative solution.
• Deploy modern security solutions for email and web security.

Secure remote working with web and endpoint security
The coronavirus crisis has been an opportunistic moment for cybercriminals. The workforce across the globe is working remotely, either from home or any other location; and many employees are using personal devices for work—accessing corporate data using their home networks. Home networks are not as secure as office networks and result in compromised security, offering a gateway to cybercriminals.

How do you strengthen the security posture of your remote workers? Securing endpoints and web access is the key! Endpoint security secures laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and other device connections that tap into corporate networks.

At FirstWave, our solution provides comprehensive, state of the art endpoint security—protecting devices like PCs, Macs, and mobile phones and letting remote workers access corporate applications securely. Moreover, it provides web security to prevent data leaks and protects from malicious web content; and employs cognitive threat analytics for enhanced security.

We all hope that the disruption to people’s lives and work from Covid-19 will end soon and we pray for everyone’s well-being. However, even when we get over Covid-19, remote working will be the new norm across many companies. Don’t forget to secure remote working with FirstWave Cloud as business continuity is more important than ever before!

Introduction

So you have this great discovery and auditing tool called Open-AudIT and you also have an amazing monitoring tool called NMIS. How can you automatically take your discovered devices and have NMIS monitor them…and why would you want to?

With version 4.2.0 of Open-AudIT, we have re-implemented Integrations in an extremely easy-to-use yet extremely configurable way.

Why?

Discovery provides network transparency. Monitoring provides network visibility. Both are essential to good network management and go hand-in-hand with diagnosing network performance issues and device management and lifecycle.

You cannot manage something if you don’t know it exists, and you cannot plan for the future if you don’t know the current performance of your devices – be they desktops, servers, switches, or routers.

Why wouldn’t you want the ability to automatically monitor select device types (for example) as they come online? You can set up a scheduled Integration and automatically include all discovered routers and switches.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Automatically monitor devices without having to set them up individually in your monitoring solution. From discovery to monitoring automatically, on your terms.

Less time spent entering details.

More accurate information with zero possibility of spelling mistakes mistyped credentials, etc.

No double handling of information between systems is required.

It just works.

Discover it in Open-AudIT, monitor it in NMIS – seamlessly.

How does it work?

Integrations take a list of devices from NMIS and a list of devices from Open-AudIT. They match the devices based on selected attributes, combine their attributes according to which system (NMIS or Open-AudIT) should be the point of truth, and update both systems based on any changes.

The list of devices may actually be empty on either side. We can restrict the device list on either side based on device attributes. We can select attributes to be stored – even if they don’t exist in Open-AudIT. NMIS and Open-AudIT don’t even need to be on the same server. There is so much flexibility!

But with great flexibility, comes (potentially) great complexity. This is an area we are particularly proud of. We’ve kept the creation of an Integration as easy as possible. At its most simple level, if NMIS and Open-AudIT are installed on the same server, you can click a ‘create’ button and everything is automatically done for you. You don’t need to supply any information. We’ve chosen sensible defaults and the Integration just works.

On the other end of the scale, you might have NMIS running on Debian and Open-AudIT running on Windows. You might wish to only integrate devices that are routers. You might even have some fields in NMIS that don’t exist in Open-AudIT, – but you wish to track and be able to edit them in Open-AudIT which then updates NMIS. It’s all completely achievable with just a few clicks.

More than the simple integration above, – but still very easy to accomplish.

No code to write, just a simple-to-use web interface. Oh, – and there is also the JSON RESTful based Open-AudIT API as well.

Questions

Now let’s back up a little bit and set the scene. You’ve been using Open-AudIT for a while and have discovered some devices on your network. You have working credentials for these devices and can see their configuration. You may have computers, switches, printers, routers, firewalls, etc.

How can we easily send some of these devices to NMIS for monitoring?
When you create an Integration in Open-AudIT, by default we include all discovered devices that have working SNMP credentials. However,  you might not want every device integrated with NMIS. Some of your servers, for example, may use SNMP – but you don’t need NMIS monitoring them. Integration has a section to select which devices to include from Open-AudIT. Every device is defaulted to have its “manage_in_nmis” attribute set to “y”. There is also a rule in Open-AudIT that sets this attribute if we talk to the device using SNMP.

But in this example, we don’t want every SNMP talking device, we only want our routers in NMIS.

In this instance, we can simply change the used attribute to “type” (instead of “manage_in_nmis”) and the value of that attribute to “router” (instead of “y”) – then we’re done!

What if I want the SNMP Community string to be defined in NMIS, not Open-AudIT?
An Integration contains a list of the fields used by both systems (NMIS and Open-AudIT). Each field has a flag that defines its ‘priority’. This can be set to either NMIS or Open-AudIT (actually stored as external or internal). Just select NMIS for the priority for the NMIS → configuration. community field and if this value is changed in NMIS, the next time the Integration is run Open-AudIT will be updated.

How can I automatically run the Integration?
Integrations can be scheduled within Open-AudIT just like discoveries, queries, baselines, et al. You can choose to run an Integration on whatever time frame you choose.

What if I’m an NMIS user, have just installed Open-AudIT, and don’t have any devices in it?
Simply run the default Integration. Your NMIS devices will be sent to Open-AudIT and discovered automatically. Open-AudIT stores more information about the make-up of a device, as opposed to NMIS’s performance data. When you run an Integration; Open-AudIT has the device’s IP and the device’s credentials.  You can then run a discovery and retrieve everything Open-AudIT can.

Again – this is configurable. You might not wish to run a discovery on the device – that’s up to you! To enable or disable a discovery is a single attribute. Click, done!

Making it Happen
As usual, the Open-AudIT wiki has all the technical details you should need. Check the Integrations page and if you still have questions, please do ask in the Community Forums.

Between suffering from uncertainty to naturally flourishing, the ability to adapt out of dead market space will have made all the difference for your business in the past year. Whether you are in a country that is on track for normality or being hit by a new wave of infections – All businesses have needed to evolve.

For those of us operating in the tech industry, we have experienced several significant economic events – especially the .com crash of 2000 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. We know what happens during an economic slowdown while there are some unique factors at play in relation to COVID-19; here is what we have learned.

Innovation should not be put off

Undergoing a 3-year change progression in a mere month was and continues to be a reality for many businesses across the globe. On countless occasions funds have been pulled from investments, particularly those in technology; deemed as a costly non-essential to cut in order to keep the boat floating. However, innovation needs to be cultivated and fed, without businesses prioritising technology their future fitness will remain grim. Opmantek’s automated network management tools were built on the premise of empowering companies. These tools give users the flexibility to operate in diverse environments with speed and scale at a fraction of the cost so you can keep innovating.

Having healthy finances is necessary

In the IT industry, an error caused by a triggered event in your network could cost a wave of rippling expenses. During periods of economic uncertainty what you don’t know can hurt you. Utilising technology such as one of Opmantek’s opEvents will reduce the impact of network faults and failures using proactive event management. Adding tools such as these to your arsenal allows you to gleam intelligent insights to make educated data and cost-effective driven decisions.

Optimising your data is the way forward

Your market no matter which side of it you are on has changed, so your business needs to change with it. More data, more data, more data, let’s face it cultivating and finding quality data is a superpower. So how is it possible to see it all? How can it be automatically configured and how can you keep up with it when it changes? Most organizations cannot give accurate location data of their assets, Open-AudIT gives you this information in seconds. Reduce the degree of uncertainty and make data-driven decisions, simply by running tools such as Open-AudIT to develop meaningful reports and resources. Optimising your data is the way forward, to learn how you can audit everything on your network with Open-AudIT book a demo session with our experts here.

Continual agility across all facets of business will be imperative to navigate through the next phase of this economic climate. Those that are familiar with nimble project management within the software development world – use similar methods in your financials too –be very conscious that your ability to plan twelve months is now a lot lower than it used to be and you need to undertake agile planning and forecasting. This will be a time of continual change however by; continually pushing innovation and utilising tools that give you the best possible view of your data to drive decision-making process, the path forward will be a lot clearer to navigate.

With 4.5 Billion internet subscribers, globally leveraging the web to perform various activities/transactions, it has become more vulnerable than ever before. In fact, according to the International Monetary Fund, the number of cyberattacks has tripled over the last decade. The constantly increasing, large scale breaches confirms that not only cybersecurity attacks are going up but they are increasing in severity, as well.

A report published by McAfee, The Hidden Cost of Cybercrime stated that – “We estimated the monetary loss from cybercrime at approximately $945 billion. Added to this was global spending on cybersecurity, which was expected to exceed $145 billion in 2020. Today, this is a $1 trillion dollar drag on the global economy.” These facts clearly signify the drastic increase in cybercrime and the importance of  cybersecurity for businesses & individuals across the world. As, besides having their reputations at stake, companies are risking their crucial/sensitive data, financial information, cash flow, tech infrastructure, customer trust & much more.

Rising Business Email Compromise (BEC) Attacks
The first half of 2020 was quite challenging for many organizations, as there was a global shift to a remote working culture while making data security a critical concern. Remote working & increasing internet transactions opened up new ways for cybercriminals to target both individuals and organizations. Business Email Compromise (BEC) is amongst the most common types of data breaches that we have witnessed throughout 2020.

Outlined below are some interesting stats that echo the fact: 

• Coronavirus-related phishing attacks and business email compromise (BEC) scams skyrocketed 3,000% from mid-March through early June, according to mid-year analysis from the Agari Cyber-intelligence Division (ACID)
• Barracuda Networks identified 6,170 malicious accounts since January that use Gmail, AOL, and other email services that were responsible for more than 100,000 Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks on nearly 6,600 organizations around the world.
• According to a recent report, The Geography BEC released in 2020 by Agari Cyber-Intelligence Division (ACID) – BEC is now responsible for 40% of all cybercrime losses—more than $26 billion in losses, since June 2016—and has victimized organizations in at least 177 countries.
• Business Email Compromise (BEC) was solely responsible for over 40% of the total cyber crime losses in 2019, at least according to the latest FBI IC3 report.

If you ignore BEC prevention now, it can cost you millions of dollars later!

Companies using cloud-based email services are lucrative targets to cybercriminals who conduct business email compromise (BEC) scams. Cybercriminals leverage technical threats & sophisticated social engineering methods to win the employee trust & conduct fraudulent activities. The need for security against such attacks is crucial as the no. of BEC scams is growing in volume and no organization is immune to the fallibility of human nature since these emails look very real & are harder for employees to identify immediately.

5 Ways Organizations Can Prevent Business Email Compromise (BEC)

1. Email Authorization with SPF: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication technique used against email spoofing. Spammers can forge your domain to send fake messages that appear to come from your organization. Such spoofed messages can be used to communicate false information, send out harmful software, or trick people into giving out sensitive information. Sender Policy Framework identifies if the mail sent from your domain is actually from your organization/mail server authorized by you or it’s a BEC attack.
2. Multi-factor Authentication: To avoid the breach of email accounts, organizations can implement measures to enhance authentication such as: encouraging a strong password set up policy, prohibiting reuse of passwords, and implementing multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication allows successful access only after the user provides various kinds of information including, but not limited to, a password and a dynamic pin, code, or biometric. This method makes it more difficult for a cybercriminal to hack an employee’s email & launch a BEC attack.
3. Establishment of an internal control system: Companies can establish an internal control system & escalation rules for responding to confirmed or suspected cases of BEC. They can establish a system for verification that facilitates collaboration between the accounting department which requests financial institutions to make money transfers, IT department which is responsible for e-mail and system operation, legal department which responds when a case involves legal issues, and the sales department which undertakes negotiations with outside business partners. In case of high valued transactions, multiple independent signatures from different departments can also be used.
4. Implementation of security protocols & staff training: Organizations can create & roll out policies to use office devices such as laptops, protocols for email passwords, and other relevant security measures to avoid BEC attacks. To counter social engineering, awareness training programs can be organized to identify breaches that get through the layers of defense. Also, whenever new strategies or attacks come to light in other organizations, such incidents should be shared with employees to increase awareness.
5. Implementation of Security Solutions: Email security solutions offer a pre-delivery protection mechanism by blocking various email-based threats like viruses, malware, ransomware, phishing, spoofing, etc. before they reach a mail server. FirstCloud™ Email Security solution offers a reliable, scalable, and feature-rich email security service that protects businesses against such BEC attacks.

Combat BEC Attacks with CyberCision Email Security!
Considering how vital it is for companies to protect their sensitive data and financial integrity, CyberCision Email Security offers an affordable inbound & outbound email security solution that can be customized for businesses of any size with unique layered protection, assured disaster recovery, and 32 days trace replay.

It uses innovative cloud content security and analytics capabilities to protect inbound emails from malware, ransomware, phishing, viruses & spam, and also detects advanced persistent threats such as spear phishing, whaling, typo domain, and spoofing attacks.

The technology is powered by FirstWave Cloud Technology’s ESP™ email software technology, Cisco-based ESA/IronPort, and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) technologies.

Moving towards a more secure future!
As we move towards a technologically advanced future, cybersecurity risk is also bound to soar, since hackers are also quickly adapting to the technological changes and are becoming more skilled in finding loopholes in the security systems. According to the Cybersecurity Market Revenues Worldwide report by Statista, the global cybersecurity market size is forecasted to grow to 248.26 billion U.S. dollars by 2023. But let’s not forget that cyber-attacks are not unavoidable. Security solutions are providing effective protection against such threats and are constantly evolving with the changing global needs.

Este ultimo par de años se ha caracterizado por ser muy caotico para algunas personas, muchas empresas estan padeciendo de incertidumbre pues inclusive se cree que la situacion podría complicarse un poco mas.

Este cambio en nuestra rutina (laboral y personal) llego de una manera muy tempesotuosa pues muy pocas entidades o ninguna etaban preparadas para este cambio y aunque así es como inician las grandes transformaciones este cambio es ha sido y seguira siendo muy complicado.

En algunos paises estan comenzando a volver a la normalidad sin embargo otros tantos estan empezando a ver una nueva ola de contagios sin embargo el final de esta situacion se visulmbra un poco mas cercano.

Es por eso que la adaptabilidad ha sido un requisito para navegar en esta pandemia.

¿Qué hemos aprendido de esta pandemia?

La innovación no debe postergarse.

En México las estimaciones afirman que empresas tuvieron que experimentar una cambio de 3 años en solo un mes y es que en muchas ocaciones las empresas dejan para despues sus inversiones en tecnologia lo cual a la larga termina siendo una necesidad para salir adelante.

Es por eso que herramientas como las de Opmantek han entrado en escena para potenciar y facilitar los cambios necesarios en las empresas.

Tener finanzas sanas es necesario.

Un forma segura para tener oportunidades de salir adelante durante la crisis es contar con finanzas saludables, es decir evitar caer en gastos inecesarios en tu negocio.

Por ejemplo en el area de TI, donde un error por originado por cualquier evento en tu red podría desencadenar en un serie de gastos.

El conocer bien todos los aspectos de tu empresa es importante y retomando el ejemplo de TI puedes confiar en modulos como  de Opmantek para ahorrar y evitar tiempos muertos y cuellos de botella en tu red.

Los datos son el mejor recurso

Aprendimos a recopilar los datos de la empresa en general, sobre su comportamiento, sobre clientes, historicos de ventas y pedidos.

Con estos recursos podemos asegurarnos de siempre tomar las mejores deciciones y reducimos considerablemente el grado de incertidumbre.

Aprende como puedes auditar todo lo que se encuentra en tu red con Open-AudIT aquí.

Estas lecciones nos han permitido salir adelante en tiempos dificiles y sin duda seguirlas llevando a cabo se ha vuelto una labor de día a día y para todas las epocas. Asegúrese de que su negocio siga adelante, reserve una demostración con nuestros expertos.

Managing complex event responses can seem like an overwhelming task, but with the right automated network management software, the process is simpler than ever. Let’s take a look at how an automated system can help you manage complex event responses.

What is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS)?

Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) are made up of components (or agents) in a dynamic network of interactions that are designed to adapt and learn according to changing events. These interactions may be affected by other changes in the system and are non-linear and able to feed back on themselves. In the Australian healthcare system, for example, complex adaptive systems have been used to analyse systematic changes.

The overall behaviour of a CAS is not predicted by the behaviours of the agents individually. The past of CAS systems is partly responsible for their present behaviour and they are designed to evolve over time.

Event automation and remediation using opEvents

opEvents is an advanced fault management and operational automation system designed to make event management easier than ever. With opEvents, you can improve your business’s operational efficiency and decrease the workload of your staff by expanding on NMIS‘s efforts and improving automated response techniques using scientific methods.

opEvents elevates NMIS’s Notification, Escalation and Thresholding systems by blacklisting and whitelisting events, handling event flap, event storms and event correlation and supporting custom email templates for each of your contacts.

Basic event automation

In order to carry out event automation successfully, there are a few simple steps that you need to take:

1. Network management – identify the top network events you respond to frequently (daily, weekly, etc.)
2. List the steps you take – troubleshooting and remediating – when the issue occurs
3. Identify how these steps can be automated
4. Create an action to respond to the event

Let’s take a look at how opEvents handles events natively:

Event action policy

Event Action policy is a flexible mechanism that dictates how opEvents reacts when an event is created. The policy outlines the order of actions as well as what actions are executed by using nested if/then statements.

Event correlation

Setting event correlation helps reduce event storms inside opEvents. opEvents will use rules that are outlined to group events together and create a synthetic event that contains event information from all events that have been correlated.

Event escalation

opEvents allows for custom event escalations for unacknowledged events. You can set custom rules based on your business or customers.

Event scripts

Events can call scripts that can be used to carry out actions such as troubleshooting, integration or remediation.

Event deduplication

All events that are related to stateful entities are automatically checked against the recent history of events and the known previous state of this entity.

Developing a CAS system

In order to develop a CAS system, it’s essential to complete the following steps:

1. Identify an individual event
2. List the steps you take – troubleshooting and remediating – when the issue occurs
3. Decide what automated action(s) can and should be carried out (data collection, remediation)
4. Identify who needs to be contacted, when (working hours, after hours, weekends) and how (Email, text, service desk)
5. Decide what should happen over time if the event is not acknowledged (remains active)

If you would like to learn more about Opmantek’s event management services, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team or request a demo.