This month we have four new tips courtesy of the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC) to help you and your business to stay safe online.
- We hope you’re wary of email attachments. Recent analysis (from VirusTotal) showed which files you should be most guarded about. HTML and compressed (.zip) formats are most frequently being used to circulate viruses right now. Javascript, PDF and .txt files are also worth extra vigilance; Office documents are less misused.
- Phishing emails (with attachments/ links), and simple scams, are the main attack route at present, say cyber company Avast. By ‘scam’ we mean ‘lying’ – prevalent examples would be sending you a personal email to say that we’ve compromised your organisation’s data. Or that we’ve used your camera to film you doing compromising things. Frequently, that’s just not true.
- If you weren’t aware of it, consider registering for the National Cyber Security Centre’s Early Warning Service. They’re the UK government agency looking after all of us, and they’ll let you know if their investigators find a weakness which they can see your systems would be vulnerable to. Type it into your search engine to find more detail.
- A note about pop-up windows in your browser. They are a bit like pictures, meaning it’s possible to configure their content entirely… so that, for example, a fake web address is shown at the top. This makes them perfect for imitating a login page. Check carefully that they’ve come from a known and trusted site.
If you’d like to stay up to date with the latest risks and get some free support to combat them, then why not become a member of the SWCRC? It is free and not for profit, plus it is led by the police and they speak “normal-speak” not geek. It could just save your data or your reputation by preventing you from being caught out.
