The Business Advisory Blog

The Business Advisory Blog

Insight, news and updates from Alliott NZ Chartered Accountants, Auckland New Zealand. The views expressed here are the views of the author and should be discussed in further detail should an article be relevant to your individual circumstances.

While every effort has been made to provide valuable, useful information in this publication, this firm and any related suppliers or associated companies accept no responsibility or any form of liability from reliance upon or use of its contents. Any suggestions should be considered carefully within your own particular circumstances, as they are intended as general information only.

Vanessa Williams
Published on

Recent Malware is a re-engineering of past IT system attacks

As you may have heard even large organisations fall victim

nimbus technology computer-security2Here's why:

Systems are not kept up to date.

  • Partly Cost or  IT/Management are too afraid of change

Protection / defence mechanisms are not implemented.

  • As per above, but many mechanisms are provided at no cost and or take very little time to implement.

IT and Management believe they are immune from attack or infection.

  • No system is immune. No single operating system is immune eg Microsoft, Apple, Android, Unix, Linux, etc.

The belief that users are all educated, intelligent people who would not fall victim to such attacks.

  • Wrong !

Recent attacks were not from a traditional virus and hence antivirus software does not protect systems. 

These attacks required the User to download (without their knowledge) and run the code, which uses code embedded in the Operating systems.

What your IT Service Provider should be doing is:

  1. Deploying best practice systems to add layers on protection to IT System
  2. Continually questioning their approach and understanding of threats that are being deployed by cyber criminals
  3. Keeping clients updated with the changing IT ecosystem.

Lessons

  • No one or system is immune.
  • Be patient with IT and management if there is some inconvenience in communication and accessing files from outside of the organisation.
  • Listen to advice, as it is often learnt from experience on other sites.
  • The Industry is continually changing, and so do the vectors and approaches that Malware, cyber criminals use.
  • Cyber criminals are there to make money, and they are doing very well in recent times
Be careful out there. Let us know if you need any help to get your IT as robust as it can be.

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