Over the Fourth of July weekend, prominent IT services provider SHI International, was a victim of a major malware attack. Based in Somerset, New Jersey, SHI is a private provider of tech services and a supplier of tech products to over 15,000 organizations and customers around the world. Their “recent security incident” and the integrity of their systems are still amid a thorough investigation with the help of law enforcement, federal agencies, and forensic experts.
Kevin McDonald (COO/CISO of Alvaka Networks) reassures that it’s a good sign that SHI systems are still down because it indicates that the company is taking their time to assiduously review the faults in their software and bring back their networks “in a secure and reliable manner.” In the interim, it is suspected that this attack was organized by sophisticated bad threat attackers for an “all-out ransomware attack” specifically targeting MSPs or Managed Service Providers such as SHI.
These cyber and ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly more common among MSP security vendors due to the fact that these Managed Service Providers “hold and manage vast amounts of customer data and critical information.” They are also much easier to infiltrate than government institutions since they lack tight security. SHI assures their clients that their internal systems and customer data is safe since there is “no evidence to suggest that customer data was exfiltrated during the attack. No third-party systems in the SHI supply chain were affected.”
Alvaka Networks’ Kevin McDonald says that though it’s premature to say what the overarching impact on the customers may be, there’s a high chance that the firm was fortunate enough in its network segregation. It seems as though the attack was contained and SHI’s IT teams and security foiled the hackers’ plans for extortion. The FBI and National Security Agency warn MSPs around the world to be alert for “malicious cyber actors-including state-sponsored advanced persistent threat groups.”
Read more about this incident at the below links:
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
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