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How eBay Can Destroy Your Business

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eBay is putting your business at risk … and not in the way you might think.

This is not about lost productivity, eBay stores, or your merchant account. This is about eBay letting hackers attack your computers.  This is about hackers using eBay to steal usernames and passwords, employee data, and customer data.

As reported by ComputerWorld, eBay is under attack by security professionals for allowing “active content” in ads, which allows hackers to create listings and fake pages with malicious code.  Over 100 eBay listings have already been found to include malicious code designed to steal usernames and passwords.  Many of these listings were hijacked from sellers with 100% ratings and years of successful sales, creating a false sense of trust.

Employees shopping during their lunch break can unwittingly open up your corporate network to hackers, enabling theft of personal and customer information.

While eBay promises to monitor and assess the situation, one simple fact remains:

Even trusted web sites from major corporations can be compromised and pose a threat to your data … and your business.

While preventing people from using the Internet is an option, it is not a realistic option in today’s world.  Active protection is your best option.  Web filtering solutions not only block known malware sites, these services examine the code, content, and behavior of sites for malicious activities like those embedded in the corrupted eBay listings.  Combined with solid endpoint/user protection, you can defend your staff, your data, and your business from attack and data loss.

Web filtering solutions cost less than $3.50 per user per month with an annual contract. Please contact us to learn more or request a quote.

Click these links to learn more about Security Threats and Web-based Malware.

 

 

5 Security Threats SMBs Should Not Overlook: Malicious Web Sites

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Security Puzzle
As more services move into the cloud, users bring their own apps to their work environment, and we see more integration and interconnect between systems, the nature security risks and threats are changing.  

This blog series looks at some of these threats, why the should be of concern to SMBs, and how SMBs can mitigate the risks.

Many small and mid-size business owners look past security threats in the belief that their businesses do not have trade secrets or other information coveted by hackers.  This view is naive.  Small businesses are ripe for attack because they often have personal, credit, or medical information about their customers and their employees.

Your business may at risk even if you are not a deliberate target. Hackers and thieves cast wide nets to capture personal information for identity theft. For identity theft, your business IT is no different than home computers.

Many businesses respond that they have security in place.  A well managed firewall, a big name malware suite that updates periodically, and spam/virus protection for their email service.

Unfortunately, users are 20 times more likely to suffer a malware attack from a corrupted web site or a phishing attempt then through the “traditional” means of email and file transfers. While traditional malware tools may catch these types of attacks, web-based malware often behaves more like acceptable code.  The recent outbreak of “crypto locker” malware, which encrypts your data and holds it for ransom, is an example of just how ineffective traditional malware prevention alone can be.

The overlooked solution to closing the web-enabled malware threat is known and simple: web filtering.  Web filters not only track sites known to be risky, insecure, or containing malware, they analyze web traffic and behavior in real-time, identifying sites that may be compromised, including those hacked without the site owner’s knowledge.

For most SMBs, adding web filtering to the ecosystem is an affordable increase in IT spending, typically less than $3.00 per employee per month.   Given that a single malware event can take 20 to 60 hours to mitigate at a cost of thousands of dollars, web filtering is a value-add component for most IT ecosystems.

Cumulus Global can assist in selecting a web filtering solution for your business.  Please contact us, or complete the form below, for more information.

Lots of Bots; Not so Many People on the Internet?

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bot-traffic-report-2013
As recently reported by CloudTweaks, a recently published analysis tells us that only 38.5% of Internet traffic is from humans.  The rest is from Bots — good and evil.

Good Bots are primarily search engines and data aggregation services.  These represent 31% of Internet traffic.  This leaves 30.5% of traffic originating from Bad Bots.  

What are the Bad Bots?

  • Scrapers: These bots scrape web sites, capturing text to steal email addresses for spam purposes or to reverse-engineer pricing and business models
  • Hackers: These bots break into sites to steal credit card data or inject malicious code
  • Spammers: Email addresses are the target for these Bots, enabling billions of useless and annoying email messages and inviting “search engine blacklisting”
  • Impersonators: These bots specialize in intelligence gathering, DdoS attacks and bandwidth consumption

The result?  Web sites, email systems, and other online activities should be secure.  Our defenses must continue to evolve and all technology users should have a basic understanding of the threats at hand.

Focusing on protecting users and data, rather than devices, creates a mindset that enables a more integrated approach and solutions.

Contact us to explore solutions that fit your business and budget.

A New Approach to Protection

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Security Key
One of the challenges in today’s world is that malware can come from anywhere.  Traditionally, viruses and other malware travelled by disk or thumb drive.  As our desktop protections improved, malware appeared in infected files attached to emails, or spam.  Today, malware is more likely to come from a web site you visit — even legitimate sites have been hacked — than anywhere else.

Additionally, malware targets every platform.  Once thought immune to viruses, MACs face some of the same risks as PCs.  Our smartphones and tablets, running iOS and Android, are also under attack with malware built specifically for those platforms and the information they often hold and access.

The problem with protecting all devices, is that we have historically needed a solution for each platform.  For those with laptops, smartphones, and/or tablets, as many as three solutions may be needed — each with purchase and subscription costs as well as administrative time and costs.  Additionally, historical malware protection focuses on infected files and malicious code on each device … even though the web is the greatest source of danger.

Looking forward, we need a better way!

Instead of working to protect devices and data, let’s focus on protecting the users.  Let’s offer protection through a single system across all devices.  Let’s offer protection that not only looks for traditional viruses and malware, but prevents malicious code and activities from hacked web sites.  Let’s deploy a solution that works with they way our users work — on smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs and MACs.  And, let’s do this without breaking the bank.

Does such a solution exist?

YES!  And, we are launching it soon.  Fill in the form, below, for pre-launch information and pricing.

Web Weary? Malware May Be the Reason

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This blog post is the third in a series on Data Protection issues and practical solutions.

Mag_GlassBy some estimates, as many as 60% of search results are tainted with malware, attracting users to infected sites and putting your systems and data at risk.  While not every infection poses a threat, the industry consensus remains that web-resident malware is on the rise.

The problem is large enough that Google Chrome users now receive warning screens, letting users know when legitimate sites have been compromised.  Google has also launched a service to help hacked web sites recover, and regain users’ trust.

While web site owners struggle to keep web sites free of malware, visitors remain vulnerable.

Fortunately, businesses can protect themselves.

Web monitoring and filtering services offer protection from malicious code embedded in web sites and allow businesses to track web activity across their networks.  Advanced web filtering services also help business manage the use of web-based applications and can monitor other web activity.

Incorporating web monitoring and filtering into your computing environment adds an additional layer of data protection.  In addition to protection from malware, web monitoring and filtering gives businesses additional control over web usage and provides a mechanism for enforcing policies and procedures.  And, for most businesses, the value of this protection should outweigh the additional cost.

 

 

The Impact of This Week’s Malware News

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For the first time, MAC users are struggling with a serious, wide-spread, malware outbreak for Mac OS.  As reported by ZDnet, Apple is struggling to define its role as customer unaccustomed to these types of problems search for answers and help.

Also, this week, Microsoft announced that 1 in 14 Internet downloads is Windows malware.  According to ZDnet, Microsoft shared the data, gathered from anonymous security reports, to tout the security features of IE9.

Both of these events give us serious pause, as they should for you.

In today’s world, the best place for your computer to catch a virus or other malware is from web site visits and downloads.  At the same time, many webmasters are unaware that hackers have compromised their sites.

Desktop and email spam and virus protection are no longer sufficient.  Web security and active web filtering are an essential security component.  If you don’t have a web security solution in place, your are neglecting one of the largest risks to your network, systems, and data.

Fortunately, you have more web security options than you may think.  Web security no longer means committing to hardware, software, and firewall upgrades.  Cloud-based web security services offer greater protection at a lower cost, and require less administrator time.

Want to know more?  Contact us and we will schedule a call.