Category: Case Studies

Regarding the CrowdStrike global IT outage.

Please be informed that Global IT™ is a registered trademark of Global IT Communications, Inc. with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and we vigorously enforce the correct usage of our trademark.

While there has been confusion in the media regarding “Global IT™ outages,” we wish to clarify that neither Global IT™ nor any of our clients were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage. Throughout this period, Global IT™ maintained uninterrupted operations.

According to reports, the recent CrowdStrike outage occurred due to a widespread disruption in its services, affecting customers’ ability to access and utilize their endpoint protection solutions. The outage reportedly stemmed from an update designed to target malicious system communication tools in cyber attacks, triggering a “logic error” resulting in an operating system crash on Windows systems (Mac and Linux users were unaffected). A logic error means a mistake has been made in coding and caused a bug that can cause the program to malfunction. The update was designed as a patch, meaning it was meant to improve the program rather than cause issues.

Global IT™ and OrangeISP.com maintained Cloud operations seamlessly without fault.

Global IT™ evaluated CrowdStrike as a potential vendor but did not select or recommend them due to specific technical considerations informed by our extensive 20+ years of experience in enterprise technical infrastructure and systems.

Global IT™ is a prominent privately held technology management firm specializing in MSP (Managed Services Provider), MSSP (Managed Security Services Provider), CSP (Cloud Services Provider), and other related services since 2004. Our service offerings are designed to support our clients’ technology needs effectively.

For further information about Global IT™ services or if you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@globalit.com.

CEO Anthony (Tony) Williams Rare

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What You Need to Know About Ransomware

If you have never heard of or experienced ransomware, then consider yourself lucky. But as more instances of ransomware are reported, that is not the kind of luck you want to take for granted. In this age of growing cybercrimes and online terrorism, it is important that everyone know what ransomware is and how to fight it.

What Is Ransomware?

The simple answer to defining ransomware is that it is a virus that takes hold of your computer and demands payment to a criminal organization to get the password that will release the virus. This affects personal and corporate computers, and it has become a big business for the criminal world. It is estimated that cyber-ransoms will become a billion dollar industry in 2016, and that only includes the paid ransoms. That figure does not include the costs for repairing the computers or recovering the information.

Once ransomware is downloaded, you will get a message telling you that your computer has been locked and you will be told that you need to take some kind of action to pay the ransom. The consequences of not paying include having all of your data erased, or permanently locking up your computer.

The more complicated description of ransomware is that it preys on your more vulnerable software applications and encrypts your computer. Normally, encryption is used to protect your data. But in this case, it locks you out of your computer and requires a password that only the criminal knows. When you pay the ransom, you hope to get the password that will open up your system. In some cases, the password is not provided after the ransom has been paid.

How To Combat Ransomware

In corporate settings, ransomware usually arrives in an employee’s email account as what looks like a safe and secure attachment. But when the attachment is open, the ransomware is loaded and it may start to move its way through the rest of the network.

In any setting, email is the most common way that ransomware gets loaded onto a computer. The second most common way is clicking on an infected website and having it loaded directly onto your computer. As frustrating as these can be, these delivery methods give us clues on how to combat these attacks.

Avoiding Ransomware

Never open an email attachment from a sender you do not recognize. Many of these criminals try to disguise their emails as being from legitimate banks or communications providers, but you should never fall for it. One way to tell if an email is from your bank is to hover your mouse pointer over any link in the email and read the associated link at the bottom of the browser. If the link does not come from your bank, then the email is a phishing email that is looking for victims.

Good antivirus software can scan your received emails and warn you against websites that are infected. You should always have good antivirus operating on your computer, and you should keep your antivirus updated constantly. Corporate IT directors should keep their firewall software up to date, and have a policy in place that prohibits employees from opening email
attachments.

 

Make sure you look over the data in the email carefully. If you are not familiar with the vendor or the prospective client, call the phone number listed in the email. Here is an example of a fraudulent company that looks legitimate. If you look closely, you can see that there are (3) s’ in the email address dave@bluegrassscontracting.com. This is easy to miss.

Corporate and personal users should always have their computers backed-up to a resource that is not online. For example, personal users can get a large capacity USB drive and back their computers up to that drive every Friday. Corporate users can utilize offline back-up systems that

are constantly updated with any changes to the network in case of an attack.

 

What To Do If You Have Been Attacked

If you open an attachment in your corporate email account and you get the ransomware warning page, then contact your manager immediately. If your manager is not available, then contact the IT manager directly to alert the IT group to the problem.

If you get ransomware on your personal computer, then you should call a computer support professional immediately. Do not try to take care of the problem yourself because it could
become worse.

 

Ransomware is just one of the growing threats that honest Internet users face every day. By practicing safe computer use habits, you can reduce your chances of getting attacked and have yourself covered in case you need to have your hard drive reloaded.

 

Case Studies

How to Create Exchange Email Forward

Note: Before you begin please ensure you are not using Google Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with this feature.
1. Click on the “Settings icon”
a. Click’ options

2. Go to “Organize email”
a. Click’ on plus sign

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

b. Select “create new rule for arriving messages…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.Create a name for your forward i.e. (Email Forward)

a. Click drop down menu under “when the messages arrives” Select “Apply to all messages”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Then click “More Options”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Click on drop down “do the following” the click “Forward, redirect, or send” than select “Forward message to”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Then you will need to select the person you would like to forward your emails to. Click “add” then click “ok”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. The name of the recipient will appear next to the red arrow, ensure it is correct then click “save”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. When you receive this the following warning click “yes”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. You will also receive this pop up message. Check the box and click “ok”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you have completed these steps the forward should take effect instantly. I would suggest testing the forward to ensure it was set up correctly. If you would like to disable the forward you will need to uncheck the box next to the forward as shown below.

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Case Studies

What would you do if the government said that the contractor who built your home must have a spare set of keys to the home, and there must be a door built on your home that only the contractor could access? Would you feel safe? How would you feel knowing that law enforcement could secretly enter your home any time it wanted simply by serving a warrant on the contractor who built your home?

When you put security in general terms such as the ones above, it sounds silly to mandate that contractors have a key to every home they have built. But in the wake of the iPhone debacle between the F.B.I. and Apple, a new bill in being introduced in Congress is trying to force technology manufacturers to make sure that your data is available to law enforcement, and anyone else who can get a copy of the key to your smartphone’s front door.

This Did Not Start In San Bernardino, California

The terrorist attacks in late 2015 in San Bernardino, California brought the issue of encryption to the forefront because of the very public battle between Apple and the F.B.I. According to the New York Times, government law authorities made 4,000 requests to access information on 16,000 phones in the second half of 2015. The reason the San Bernardino case became so popular is because the government deemed the incident an act of terrorism, and fighting terrorism is a prime concern in the United States.

Under normal circumstances, federal law mandates that technology companies provide information for investigations unless the company feels that providing that information would be harmful in some way. Apple argued that being asked to bypass its own encryption would weaken the security it offers its customers, and that sparked a battle that is still raging.

The Secure Data Act Versus The Compliance With Court Orders Act Of 2016

In 2015, long before any battles over encryption in the media, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced the Secure Data Act to Congress. In a nutshell, the Secure Data Act says that manufacturers cannot be told by any government agency to weaken the security of their products to allow investigators to access encrypted data. The bill is still in draft form in both houses, but it has gained a great deal of support since the battle between Apple and the F.B.I. over San Bernardino.

After the San Bernardino encryption battle was made public, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr introduced the Compliance With Court Orders Act of 2016. This act basically says that manufacturers must create ways to bypass their own encryption, or have a method for storing user data so that it can be turned over to investigators. This is the legal version of the contractor with a key to your house example we started with. This bill is also in draft form, and it is causing a lot of controversy, but having problems gaining real traction.

The Core Of The Debate

What this debate boils down to is that some factions in the government want to force manufacturers to make user data accessible, and other factions want to preserve privacy. If the Compliance With Court Orders Act is passed, companies like Google would have to redesign products such as Gmail to make user data accessible. Right now, Google cannot read user emails at all unless Google has access to a user’s computer. If this bill becomes law, Google and anyone else who can get past the weakened Gmail encryption could read any user’s email.

If the new compliance bill becomes law, then user data could be exposed at levels that the lawmakers may not realize. A disgruntled Google employee could wind up selling data from millions of Gmail address, or a terrorist could access an iPhone to get all of the personal data that phone contains. As it stands right now, it is almost impossible for tech companies to access encrypted data, and that is what makes the data so safe. If things start to change, then there could be major issues with privacy that users may not realize until it is too late.

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Case Studies

Madison Valleywood sounds like a character from the next John Waters’ film, but it is actually a nickname given to the United States government’s latest attempt to combat ISIS online. Despite what may be the popular conceptions up to this point, ISIS is not reaching out and causing havoc at high levels through cyber terrorism. In order to understand what is and can be done to defeat ISIS online, it is important to have a general understanding of ISIS and how it works.

What Is ISIS?

ISIS is a terrorist organization that occupies large portions of Syria and Iraq, and has declared its intentions to create an Islamic world which ISIS would rule. As of 2016, ISIS has about eight million civilian subjects and several sources of income to fuel its efforts. Some of the more lucrative recurring sources of ISIS income include:

• Income tax on its people
• Oil revenue of around $1 million to $3 million per day
• Money stolen from the banks and governments ISIS defeats

The primary stated goal of ISIS is to bring down the Western World and replace it with Islamic rule, ISIS style. ISIS is smart enough to know that if it wants to defeat the Western World, it will have to become proficient in cyber terrorism. When you take an objective look at what ISIS has been able to accomplish so far online, the future does not look bright for this terrorist organization.

The ISIS Online Threat

It is important for people to remember that just because ISIS takes credit for a major online security breach does not necessarily mean that ISIS actually committed the breach. Despite the availability of money and recruits with technical backgrounds, ISIS’ Internet capabilities are extremely limited. To this point, ISIS has only been able to:

• Use social media to recruit new members and send out threatening messages to the Western World
• Hack websites with weak security protocols
• Take advantage of lapses in online security for larger websites and exploit those weaknesses

Right now, the online capabilities of ISIS rival those of a group of hackers angry at the world. While ISIS has been able to hack into low level government websites and some American banks, its ability to hack credit card user databases is commonplace among other high level hacker groups.

Where ISIS really shines online is its use of social media to recruit new members, arrange attacks using lone attackers, transfer funds to groups around the world, and send video messages to the world. As long as ISIS is able to reach mass audiences using social media, then it remains a threat.

What The Government Is Doing

Madison Valleywood is the nickname given to the government initiative to reach out to technology companies and social media websites to shut down the access ISIS has to the rest of the world. Companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Twitter are being asked to develop ways to combat ISIS online, and also being asked to follow government directives to remove the ability for ISIS to use the Internet in its operations.

n shows that there are still some areas where technology companies are unwilling to alter what they do to appease the government. However, Twitter has shut down hundreds of thousands of ISIS-related accounts and is constantly gathering data to shut down more accounts. If Madison Valleywood becomes a cohesive operation between the government and the companies of Silicon Valley, then that may be all of the technology the government will need to help defeat ISIS once and for all.

Find out more:

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/01/americas-new-plan-fight-isis-online/125043/

https://www.flashpoint-intel.com/home/assets/Media/Flashpoint_HackingForISIS_April2016.pdf

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2015/03/02/how-to-defeat-isis-and-why-it-probably-wont-happen/

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/24/politics/justice-department-apple-fbi-isis-san-bernardino/

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Case Studies

Note: Before you begin please ensure you are not using Google Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with this feature.

1. Click on the “Settings icon”

a. Click’ options

2. Go to “Organize email”

       a. Click’ on plus sign

 

 

 

 

     b. Select “create new rule for arriving messages…”

 

 

 

 

3. Create a name for your forward i.e. (Email Forward)

a. Click drop down menu under “when the messages arrives” Select “Apply to all messages”

 

 

 

 

4. Then click “More Options”

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Case Studies