Following the event of the successful and large scale ransomware attack, and a very busy weekend for a lot of Managed Service Providers, we wanted to inform you and your organisations what actions you can take now, and in future, to assist in reducing the exposure and risk from these types of cyberattacks. 

What is WannaCrypt and what does it do?

Myles Gray is a cloud technologist at Novosco, primarily focussing on public cloud R&D, designing customer platforms and services, and utilising automation for both self-hosted and private customer clouds. He is also a: VMware vEXPERT 2016-2017 (NSX, vSAN), VCIX-NV, VCAP-DCV and a Veeam Vanguard.

You can find him blogging at blah.cloud and climbing the occasional mountain.

Question: What do you do, and what do you love about it?

Myles: Essentially, I get to design, tweak, improve-upon, and play with really cool technologies!

Malware used to be about hackers being disruptive and causing an inconvenience - random or politically motivated groups making a point.  Not so any more.  Now it’s a serious, almost professional activity directed at doing real harm and making real money.  

Cisco’s Annual Security Report 2016 documented the statistics of the Angler exploit kit targeting up to 90,000 victims per day and reaping a staggering $34m annual revenue for the hackers.

Multi Layered Network Security describes a series of strategies that collectively build a security protection plan to prevent malicious attacks from entering an environment and compromising systems and data.

There are five key network areas to consider when developing an infrastructure security posture:

Recent years have seen increased pressure on IT to be flexible and agile, requiring investment in different technologies and processes to deliver IT services in new ways.  All too often, human resources have become the limiting factor, with recruitment cycles potentially lasting several months; innovation is curbed and productivity limited by the lack of the right technology skills.

There are lots of reasons why an IT department may not have the resources on hand, such as;