As a kid, and
even as an adult, I like to play the picture games where you are given two
nearly identical pictures and told to find the differences.
This months newsletter is similar to those picture games. Can
you find five warning signs in this email?
Look closely.
Answers:
1. Does
your domain (internet site) receive or send faxes? For the
majority of local businesses, the answer is no. Your first
warning sign is the “from line”. It’s coming from a
non-existent address.
2. Do
you know the person(s) the email is addressed to? If not,
then this is probably a hoax.
3. Your
“new” scan is from Epson. Epson is a printer.
Do you own an Epson? And does anyone in your
organization send you unsolicited faxes from your Epson.
4. By
https://yourdomain.com. Again, does your domain send or
receive faxes?
5. Download
at: dropbox.com + way to many random digits and numbers .
Does your organization subscribe to a dropbox account?
Dropbox is a file sharing utility. It works wonderfully for
taking work home or on the road with you. Anything you save
into your dropbox folder will be available to you when you reach your
destination and any changes you make will be synchronized across all computers
with access to the account, but the point is: It doesn’t
matter how wonderful dropbox is, if your organization doesn’t have a dropbox
account, then clicking on a link to a dropbox account probably isn’t the best
idea.
Want to know
what happened when the recipient clicked on the dropbox link?
The virus encrypted every word, excel and pdf file on the workstation and 2000
shared files on the server. The cleanup choices were to pay
$500 to the ransom holders or rebuild from current backups.
Fortunately, current backups were available.
You have two
choices: Be educated concerning what you should or shouldn’t
trust coming thru your email and/or keep current backups. If
you need help setting up an affordable and reliable backup solution, please
contact me.
By the way:
This virus has a name: CryptoWall.
Antivirus
software is unable to stop this virus but education and good decisions can keep
this virus from activating.
~Janet