More and more companies are getting hacked every day.

What are you doing about it?

Recently we have been seeing a spate of personalised and specific hacks customised against certain companies. Its been in the news for major organisations, and we’re seeing it as well on companies from 5 – 500 users too. Which means you are probably vulnerable as well.

Attacks against companies come most commonly in three forms.

1/ Brute force attacks against firewalls and unpatched server to gain access – this is normally not very successful.

2/ Bulk emailed phishing scams containing cryptolocker / malware/ remote access payloads etc. Varying success.

3/ Email Phishing Scams which are customised and targeted at individuals and companies. THIS IS THE PROBLEM.

We’ve all seen the fake apple store receipts, fake Australia post tracking emails, plus the myriad of other fake emails all trying to get you to press a link that will infect your machine or give hackers a backdoor to your system.

The problem is these emails are becoming more and more crafty, and unless your users are 100% aware of what they’re looking at and clicking, then you’re inadvertently putting your entire organisation at risk of being hacked.

EtherTech can now supply you with phishing & scam training in response to this ever-increasing threat. More and more clients are coming on board every day as they see the value in continuous training of their staff against the most recent vulnerabilities as well as helping to meet their training obligations.

The program itself consists of an initial free ‘test’ of your staff to see how likely they are to click on a fake email. (The average failure rate per organisation is 20%.)

Once signed up for the course, there is an initial training video that all staff need to watch to learn about the risks and how to identify them, then there are automated monthly random emails that are sent to see whether the individuals have learnt what to look for. If they continue to click these emails they are re-trained and re-tested using different techniques until they no longer fail the tests.

There are extensive training videos and courses that can be customised for your workplace and work type. Active Directory Integration means that when you have a new employee start they will automatically be enrolled in the course and receive emails to attend training. Portal access to see how your staff are going and who needs more training plus much much more.

The course runs over 3 years and works out at only $25 per user per year (from 1-50 users) (discounts apply > 51 users).

As a SPECIAL OFFER, EtherTech are also offering the ‘home training’ system to each subscribed business user, which allows your staff to train their kids, their spouse, their grandparents. The value in this extra home training system is immeasurable.

Please give us a call on 1300-ETHERTECH to arrange your test!

Until next time!

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Wow!.. what a start to the new year its been!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the impact of Donald Trump as President has been and will continue to cause waves all over the world, not the least has been his latest venture into preventing immigrants with green cards from re-entering the US which has caused bedlam within the IT industry as well as many other industries, who employ a lot of overseas workers. Hopefully the US will sort itself out and some normality will return to our day to day operations, as currently there is a lot of market uncertainty.

Getting back to specific IT news though, vulnerabilities seem to be a constant problem for everyone these days. You’d notice all the Microsoft Updates that get applied to your machines on a regular basis to fix bugs and security problems, but what about other applications and even your website? They are not automatic, and need to be manually updated to fix any issues. Unfortunately most software vendors don’t maintain up-to-date mailing lists and/or don’t notify their users of problems until its too late.

One such thing that has come across my inbox this last week has been a MAJOR vulnerability with WordPress (which is website software that a LOT of companies (like EtherTech) use to run their websites).

The release states :

HOMELAND SECURITY – US-CERT
National Cyber Awareness System:
WordPress Releases Security Update
01/26/2017 10:25 PM EST

Original release date: January 26, 2017 | Last revised: February 01, 2017

WordPress 4.7.1 and prior versions are affected by multiple vulnerabilities. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected website.

On February 1, WordPress disclosed an additional vulnerability that is fixed in version 4.7.2.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review the WordPress Security Release and upgrade to WordPress 4.7.2.

If you currently have a website that uses wordpress you need to get this addresses pretty quickly before your site is attacked and/or hacked.

If you need help doing these upgrades EtherTech can advise and perform upgrades to sites that use wordpress and associated plugins. (normal hourly rates apply) for you. We can also setup regular maintenance for these sites if required (as we’ve found most web designers simply design the site, get the money and that’s it. They never update it ever again. Please give us a call.

Office365.

If you’re currently running on an alternative mail system to Office365, please give us a call and let us discuss with you the benefits and potential cost savings you can make by switching to Office365.
For example, we recently switched on of clients with 40 mailboxes to office365 and after all the migration costs and our costs and office365 licensing costs they have a ROI of 3 years, then save approx. $3600 a year ongoing plus they have access to the latest Office applications and the extra Microsoft applications and features. Call us for a meeting and a quote!

Please give us a call anytime on 1300-ETHERTECH!

Until next time!

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