Viruses – the Human Element
Written by Marc Ozin Thursday, 28 May 2009
Quite recently, one of our synagogues had a problem with a PC that turned out to be infected with a virus. The synagogue’s network was secure, they had up-to-date virus checking on their PCs and Email Servers, the virus was only on one PC, so what happened?
It turned out that the virus was transmitted as an infected Trojan attachment.
The virus was very new and managed to sneek in on one email a couple of minutes before the Virus Protection vendor released a new update.
This still wouldn’t have posed a problem except for the fact that the recipient of the email happened to have system administrator rights on their PC and opened the attachment.
This kind of incident, although swiftly dealt with is a good example that even a small chink in the armour on internal PC security can pose a threat to your systems and as a reminder that as well as technical security aspects no one should forget the human element of IT as well.
- Make and test regular backups
- Make sure your firewalls are correctly configured
- Make sure your Virus Protection is up-to-date
- Make sure your security patches are up-to-date
- Make sure users only have rights to do the things that they need to do and no more than necessary
If you can, audit this reguarly to make sure! - Last but not least - users should have some ownership of the network they work on.
They should be taught good practice and understand that they are a key component in making sure the systems are secure.
I recently found a lovely little web page that as well as dishing out some good practice gives some explanation as to how you may receive dodgy attachments in the first place here:
http://cybercoyote.org/security/av-attach.shtml
Happy reading!
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