Cyber-criminals

Cybercrime May Be Setting the Pace for Effective Disaster Recovery

It may seem strange to talk about observing cybercriminals at work, in order to beef up one’s own disaster recovery. DR planning and management in honest enterprises are often required as preparation and repair regarding malware attacks, illicit infiltration and control, data compromise, and other cyber nasties. Yet criminals, so it seems, are learning about disaster recovery tactics too, in order to build resilience into their attack infrastructure and resources. European and American police forces have been working to break criminals’ botnets, which are networks of machines such as PCs and servers belonging to others, but infected or controlled by attackers. The botnets may be used to spread malware infections or to perpetrate denial of service attacks on yet other machines. Police teams now see a trend among criminals to create several smaller botnets, rather than one bigger one. If one botnet is discovered and broken, the criminals can then Read more

2016-08-30T15:37:27+10:00By |Disaster Recovery|

3 Human Factors that Make Technical Support an IT Security Risk

Cyber criminals latched onto technical support a long time ago, seeing many possibilities for scams and attacks. Most recently, tech support scams to cold-sell support packages over the phone have been popular – according to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec, which also noted a 200 per cent increase in tech support scams overall in 2015 compared to 2014. Fake alerts on PCs try to get users to call a free phone number for assistance. At the other end of the line, a scammer tries to persuade users to install software to “fix problems”, software that in reality is malware, such as ransomware. But the real reasons for success with the scam are not technical at all. Read more

2016-05-26T10:56:05+10:00By |Disaster Recovery|

Threats and Horizon Scanning with a Bit of Darwin and Cybernetics

What gives business continuity managers sleepless nights? Snowstorms, pandemics, hurricanes and industrial action have all topped the list at one time or another. At the moment, cyber-attacks are the hot item. According to at least one recent report, hackers are considered number one out of the threats potentially affecting enterprises and organisations today. Who will survive? Darwin said that it would be the fittest. He meant those entities best adapted to their environment, and not necessarily the strongest, the fastest or even the smartest. Do Darwin’s ideas translate from the real into the virtual world, and what does it mean for threats and horizon scanning? Read more

2015-04-20T10:01:55+10:00By |Business Continuity|