A three bullet summary of your current e-mail threats

Proofpoint Threat Operations and Research recently published their quarterly threat report for July - September 2016, which includes key findings such as: 

  • Volume of malicious emails rose to their highest levels ever
    New campaigns bearing varied attachment types broke volume records set in Q2, peaking at hundreds of millions of messages per day. JavaScript attachments continued to lead these very large email campaigns, growing 69% this quarter.
  • Ransomware variants grew tenfold
    In particular, 97% of messages with malicious document attachments featured the popular ransomware strain Locky, while CryptXXX was the dominant ransomware delivered by exploit kit (EK).

Download the full report. Please let us know if you have any questions related to this report or how Alvaka Networks can protect your people and data from attacks.

A three bullet summary of your current e-mail threats2016-10-24T13:44:00-07:00

Beware of this new domain name and SEO registration scam

Orange County, CA - I want to thank Alvaka network engineer Alex Estevez for bringing the e-mail below to my attention. One of his clients got this bogus message from GoDaddy. The scams on the internet know no ends for creativity and treachery.

This message looks so authentic and it can be so easy to go ahead and pay for a scam renewal and give up your domain login credentials too. Once you give up those credentials the thief(s) can potentially sell your domain name. For many businesses that would be devastating even if it only lasted a short time while the theft gets corrected. On top of the charge on your card they could potentially sell your credit card information as well.

Alex said, “What made me suspicious was the fact that the email came from a company called “Intranetregistrarnetwork.com” which just sounded bogus to me.“ That site is now shutdown, but count on another one to pop-up soon.

Here is what the e-mail looked like. As you can see it looks quite legitimate. It does not contain the spelling errors and poor grammar associated with so many e-mail scams....

Beware of this new domain name and SEO registration scam2024-04-21T19:41:30-07:00

You’re the Non-technical Boss with Responsibility for the Network…

How do you know your most important functions of your network are working?  How do you manage technical people whose work you don’t fully understand?  This week I have seven simple questions to ask and I provide you some tips on what answers you should expect.

Backup and Disaster Recovery is one of the most important functions in Information Technology management to assure the future viability of your firm.  But backup and DR is a function you don’t really know is working until you really need it and that is not the time to find out it is not working as planned.  My recommendation is that you bring this topic up in your next meeting with your IT team.  Here are the questions I suggest you ask:

1.       How is our backup system running?  (Let your IT person talk.  Be patient and don’t interrupt.  Let them tell you all they can.)

2.       Are we getting any error messages from the backups? (Error messages are not....

You’re the Non-technical Boss with Responsibility for the Network…2015-10-07T22:13:17-07:00