Sudbury Computer Repair Blog

To keep your business  running smoothly, you need computer and network security. It is important to maintain your network and systems, making sure they are virus and malware free,  current with security patches, and running at optimal performance.

Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents you from using your computer or accessing your data until you pay a certain amount or "ransom" to a remote entity. There are two types of ransomware:

• Lockscreen ransomware, which displays a full-screen image or webpage that prevents you from accessing anything in your computer, and
• Encryption ransomware, which encrypts your files with a password, preventing you from opening them

Most ransomware displays a notification, saying that the ‘authorities in your location have detected illegal activity in your computer’. To avoid prosecution, and regain access to your files, ransomware demand payment from you in the form of a "fine".

Paying the "fine" does not necessarily return your computer to a usable state. We do not advise that you pay. With ransomware, the threat of prosecution does not come from the legitimate authorities.

FAQ’s about ransomware

Q: Is it true that the legal authorities in my area have detected illegal activities in my computer?

A: No. These warnings are fake and have no association whatsoever with the legitimate authorities. The operators of ransomware abuse the tone, images and logos of legal institutions to give their scam an air of legitimacy.

Q: I cannot access my computer or my files. Should I just go ahead and pay these people to regain access?

A: No. Do not pay, regardless of how legitimate or threatening the claims look. You will only end up giving money to criminals, who have no intention of giving you back access to your computer or files.

Q: What should I do if I've paid the scammers?

A: In all cases, you should contact your financial institution and your local authorities. If you paid with a credit card, your financial institution may be able to block the transaction and return the money to you.

Q: How did the scammers know my IP address?

A: There are publicly available tools online that can check a computer's IP address. Getting IP addresses is common behavior for malware - in the case of ransomware, it is used as another scare tactic.

Q: How did ransomware get on my computer?

A: Ransomware, like other malware, can arrive in a variety of ways. However, in most instances, it is downloaded automatically into your computer when you visit a malicious website or a website that's been compromised.

Q: How do I regain access to my computer or files?

A: Do not pay the fine. Ransomware have varying behavior and will have to be removed in different ways. Refer to How to remove a ransomware infection for steps on how to remove ransomware.

For computer system security, contact Sudbury Computer.

Excerpts - microsoft

Your email has been hacked. An E-mail worm is an infection that uses your system to send out mass mailings.  It will generally grab your address book and send an email to everyone you know. They expect that your colleagues will open mail if it comes from you.

The new generation of E-mail worms are getting trickier and using address spoofing to help hide the worm.  When a system gets infected, the worm sends out an infected E-mail to everyone in the address book.  The difference is that it uses a random address in the address book as the from address.  This makes it look like the infected mail came from someone totally different that may have a clean system.  This person generally gets blamed by everyone for sending out the infected E-mail when they actually had nothing to do with it thus making it more difficult to track down the actual infected system.

If you are accused of-, or think you may have an infected computer system, take these steps.

1. Run a virus scanner and a malware scanner to make sure that your system is actually clean.
2. Look at the headers of the E-mail to see where it actually originated from as this can help convince people that you are not the one who is infected.  Here is a good site to help you interpret E-mail headers.  http://www.mxtoolbox.com/emailheaders.aspx
3. Send a link to this article to your accuser so they can better understand how Worms and Spoofing work.

For more information or assistance, contact Sudbury Computer.

You will want to have reliable email security in place to protect your business network. If you are hosting email in house, you have a few options.  Use software on your mail server, use a device on your network to scan your mail before it hits your mail server or use a cloud based solution.

Using software on your mail server can be effective but it puts a lot of extra stress on your mail server as well as your network.  It also is not the best idea to allow infected mail to hit your mail server before dealing with it, although there are several decent products on the market that handle this fairly well.  This can be a fairly inexpensive solution up front with reasonable ongoing support/maintenance costs.

Using a hardware filtering appliance is a nicer solution although the upfront costs may be prohibitive.  You will also have ongoing support/maintenance costs with this solution.  The hardware appliance will scan all of the mail after it arrives on your network and will only hand it off to the mail server once it is certified virus/SPAM free.  One downside is that mail is still coming into your network stressing your routers, switches, etc.

Cloud based solutions check all of your mail on their servers, forwarding to your mail server after mail has been certified clean.  They will block infected email and SPAM before it hits your network keeping the load off of your routers, switches and mail server.  The online solution will prevent you from using extra bandwidth and unnecessary storage.  You will pay a monthly fee per user.  This is the preferred method of Sudbury Computer because with the massive amounts of SPAM coming in these days, this traffic can  be overwhelming to a network.

With any of these email security solutions you will have a method of scanning through blocked mail to see if anything was identified that wasn't SPAM (false positives) and will have the ability to release it.  You will also have the ability to create white lists for people that you always want mail to be allowed from.

For more information on email security options, contact Sudbury Computer.

Every business, at some time or another, will suffer from some form of computer hard drive failure.  The biggest threat to your business during a hard drive failure is data loss. There are many causes of data loss, including hard drive failure or malware, but each scenario is unique. If there is no data backup in place it is likely that not all data will be recoverable.

If you have previously backed-up your system or data, you can restore your data from that previously created backup. But, never assume your system backups are running.  System backups need to be monitored constantly. Data loss can put a company in a position where it is unable to conduct business because important data cannot be accessed.  
 
Do not overlook the importance of backups to your business. If system backups are being done regularly, either daily or hourly, your business is safe and protected. Data can be restored from the backup, with minimal loss or downtime. However, establishing a system back up plan for your data is not the end of your responsibilities as a business owner. Be sure you have an offsite copy of those backups – either carried offsite or streamed to online storage.

Sudbury Computer highly recommends that your business devise a system backup plan. You should also review this back up plan regularly.  Unfortunately, sooner or later all systems will face some type of failure which will require data to be restored from your system backup.  Depending on the type of business you own and how your data changes from day to day you need to determine how often to perform computer backups - weekly, daily, or several times per day.

Protect your business; ensure that you have safe and secure system backups that are not being stored on-site. Additionally, be sure those backups are being performed properly so your business will have them when you need them.

If your business has made backups of all the data stored on your computer hard drives, restoring that data in the event of a loss will go much more quickly. For more information, or to create a system backup plan, contact Sudbury Computer.

Introducing the new Sudbury Computer website, welcome to our blog page. Here you will find out about the latest information on IT services for small and medium sized businesses in all industries.  From system monitoring and IT managed services, to IT support and disaster recovery, Sudbury Computer is your outsourced IT service provider.

Sudbury Computer offers the Sudbury, Wayland, Marlborough, and Framingham areas with a solution to IT services and disaster recovery needs. If you have a small to medium sized company, it is much more cost effective to hire an outside IT company rather than a full-time staff.  Sudbury Computer can help you keep your business running. In the unfortunate event that a data disaster occurs, we can get you up and running again, with minimal interruption to business.
 
This blog is a where you can find information on the latest technology, trends, hardware and software. We offer the information and know-how to keep your business running and we are happy to assist you and share with you our extensive IT knowledge.

Please subscribe to our blog, we will be updating it weekly so you can stay up to date on the latest new products and information.

For those of you who run their own Exchange environment, RIM is now offering a free version of their Enterprise software. This will allow you to sync Contacts, Calendar and E-mail over the air.

This is a great move for RIM who had always been known for only being a good option for large enterprises due to the high price tag of their Enterprise software. I have the professional version running at a few customer sites and it does a great job. The express looks pretty similar to the professional version sans the price tag.

Download directly from RIM... http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/business/server/express/