Spam! Annoying. Right? Replica watches, designer suits…. some items that cannot be mentioned otherwise we may hit Google with the wrong search terms and attract the wrong audience. Yes spam is annoying, however rarely destructive. Email security solutions were primarily designed to prevent spam. At Carden IT Services we have tried and tested many of the products on offer from many of the different vendors with mixed results. From all of these we located flaws in the solution such as false positives, spam slipping through the net and downtime caused by insufficient resources on the providers networks. Then the game changed. With the fairly new and very destructive type of infection out in the dirty air known as Ransomware, the requirements for email security have changed.
Ransomware – What Is It?
As described in our recent blog post, Ransomware is a form of malware with a destructive payload. Once infected the Ransomware will begin to encrypt your data on your machine and network shares over the course of a few days, often so you do not realise it is happening until it is too late. With the destruction occurring over many days or hours this could lead to your backups seeing that everything has changed and backing up encrypted destroyed files over your nice clean data. Even online backups are at risk unless you have a long retention plan in place.
Email Security
Ransomware mainly travels via email in the form of fake invoices, delivery notices and quotes. There are various procedures that should be in place to prevent successful delivery of these attachments:
- A good email security scanning system, preferably cloud based to save bandwidth
- Policies on the email server (i.e. to block specific file types, names etc)
- The most important – employee training! Communicate with your teams letting them know to take care on what they open. These Ransomware creators are trying to beat the above systems and the above systems can only update their patterns once people like us have reported them. These are know as 0day attacks,
The team at Carden IT can put these all into place for you. Our main offices are located in Brighton and London, however we service the whole of the UK. Please contact us to book a free analysis of your email setup.