The Daily Telegraph reports today that a town council in Devon is being held to ransom after hackers demanded £3,000 for the safe return of documents including its allotments waiting list. Triggered by a town clerk opening a suspicious “phishing” email, the cyber attack has resulted in a virus being uploaded onto the council’s computer system, in the process wiping all records held since 2015. Known as “Locky ransomware”, the hack has scrambled the council’s records into encrypted code, meaning they are unreadable.
Anti-virus programs can only protect an end user’s computer if the infections are known and are on the virus database but what can you do to stop attacks by unknown zero-hour 2nd generation malware?
Simple…deploy Heimdal Security across all the end users’ computers.
What is Heimdal Security?
Information theft and data leakage increased by more than 50% over the last two years and continue to create new security challenges for end users across continents. Heimdal Security protects an end user’s private information and data by combining different safety measures:
Automatic patching of 3rd party software?
More than 85% of all attacks happen by using vulnerabilities in 3rd party software. Heimdal identifies and automatically updates 3rd party software on any computer it is installed upon, so that cyber criminals won’t be able to take advantage of any ‘hole’. Heimdal is designed to have low resource consumption, using as few system resources as possible – only 35 MB of memory – and works without interrupting the user.
Traffic scanning – Malicious site blocking, Zero-hour protection, Data protection
Both work-related and private internet usage create challenges for corporations, as it becomes difficult for the average user to defend himself from advanced malware techniques employed by cyber criminals. Since malicious code can be executed even from legitimate websites, through drive-by attacks, or through phishing links, checking all traffic is a must for any organisation of any size. 91.3% of ransomware dials back via DNS to gather its encryption key, this fundamentally is where the damage is done. Heimdal Security scans down to DNS level – this is unique… whilst also scanning HTTP and HTTPs traffic.
Heimdal Security is not an anti-virus product.
The Daily Telegraph article in full >>
