The small hero of local storage

Down to earth, solid and secure

Keeping your organisation’s data in the Cloud isn’t always the only and right option. It’s more about finding an approach that suits you.

A survey in various countries across Europe has revealed that despite the opportunities that the Cloud offers, about 90% of employees still use USB drives to transport data. This is for good reason, as USB drives:

  • Allow you to work independently without the need for internet & Cloud access
  • Require a one-off investment only and don’t require any maintenance
  • Don’t need a lengthy set-up and contract

The nuclear option!

Yet we also know that many organisations lock down USB ports and ban their employees from using them. This isn’t always a sensible solution, as it limits flexibility and can encourage employees to search for workarounds such as private email or Cloud services.

Smart alternatives to the nuclear option of locking down USB ports include:

  • Rolling out encrypted USB drives company-wide to provide your users with the secure file sharing solutions they need to do their job quickly and effectively
  • Integrating encrypted USB drives into your companies’ security strategy and architecture via endpoint management
  • Educating your employees on data security and training them on how to use USB drives securely

Kingston’s encrypted USB drives come with a variety of customisation options that make them fit with your organisation’s security needs, strategy and policies.

How we can help

Complete IT Systems and Kingston Technology have the solutions, experience, accreditations and skills to provide your business with the security solutions you need. For more information call us on 01274 396 213 or contact us and we can call you back.

Why are mobile devices like a needle in a haystack for IT?

When your business depends on response speed and access to data and email, ‘on the go’ availability is a must. However, more access brings more mobile data security threats. That is why it is rational to assess risks and have a well-thought-out protection strategy before adopting mobile device usage across your business.

As part of our series of blogs highlighting the pitfalls of cyber security for business, this week we’re looking at why mobile devices with access to business data can prove to be a needle in a haystack for IT to keep track of.

Mobile devices – a needle in a haystack for IT

An employee’s mobile device is an interesting target to a broad array of cybercriminals. Some are looking for corporate intellectual property (and according to Kaspersky’s “IT Security Risks Survey 2018,” employees in 1 in 5 enterprises access corporate intellectual property using their personal mobile devices and tablets). Others think that your contact list is good loot — it can be used for spear-phishing attacks on your colleagues.

While those are rather exotic threats, don’t forget about more widely distributed malware that doesn’t target a specific business. Last year, our systems registered 42 million attempted attacks on mobile devices. They included a variety of Trojans that tried to hijack social media and bank accounts, ransomware, and more. They may not sound as scary as targeted attacks, but they can cause plenty of harm, especially if the accounts in question are corporate ones, and the situation is especially common in small and medium businesses.

Mobile specifics

The main problem with mobile devices is that they do not stay inside a company’s security perimeter, which makes pinpointing the threats akin to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack for IT. They can be exposed to unsecured public Wi-Fi or just be lost or stolen. When employees use the same device for both work and personal activities, more problems pop up. An employee might accidentally download a compromised application preloaded with a spying module or ransomware, for example. They might try to root or jailbreak their device and expose it to even more threats.

Some of the problems with mobile data security — unfortunately, not all of them — can be solved with mobile device management and enterprise mobility management solutions. To resist sophisticated malware, companies need an additional level of protection.

How to prevent business mobile security breaches

Kaspersky’s ‘Security for Mobile’ solution was recently updated to include machine-learning-assisted technologies with cloud-based threat intelligence mechanisms to bring threat prevention, detection, and remediation to mobile platforms and thus keep your business information safe.

For example, Kaspersky Security for Mobile can detect if an employee’s smartphone or tablet is jailbroken or rooted (bad enough if the employee did it, but worse if done without their knowledge). Our solution also provides application control, Web traffic control, antiphishing, and antispam subsystems to corporate devices.

Kaspersky Security for Mobile integrates with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, iOS MDM, and Samsung KNOX platforms; and Kaspersky Security for Android (a part of this solution) is also compatible with VMware AirWatch and MobileIron. That compatibility allows your IT staff to configure and control security management for most widely used mobile devices.

Want to find out more?

As Kaspersky Platinum Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Are your users using USBs to share company information?

USB sticks

The USB stick is one of those seemingly harmless plug-in accessories that we’ve all used for sharing files and for those last-minute meeting room nightmares when your colleague that was supposed to be presenting your team’s update can’t get online or connect to the projector!

USB sticks

Various incarnations, shapes and sizes of USB devices have been around for almost 20 years now, offering an easy and convenient way to store and transfer digital files between computers that are not directly connected to each other or to the internet.

Even though there’s cool new ways to share things online and via cloud apps, there’s no harm in your users keeping USB sticks ‘just in case’, right? Nowadays, cloud services such as Dropbox have taken on much of USB stick’s traditional workload in terms of file storage and transfer, and there is greater awareness of the security risks associated with USB devices. Because of this, USBs use as an essential business tool is declining – yet millions of USB devices are still produced and distributed annually, with many destined for use in homes, businesses and as marketing promotional items for trade show giveaways.

Is this scaremongering or is the risk of company data loss from USBs real?

99 times out of 100 probably not. But there’s always that risk as Heathrow Airport among many others have found out with its recent £120,000 fine from the ICO. While Heathrow largely ‘got away with that one’ from a hacking perspective at least, USBs have been exploited by cyberthreat actors, most famously by the Stuxnet worm in 2010, which used USB devices to inject malware into the network of an Iranian nuclear facility. And as well as the actual risk of company data loss, there’s also the reputational risk and financial damage of fines from regulations such as the GDPR.

We also understand that laptops, tablets, phones and other such portable endpoint devices with access to sensitive data will always be areas of potential data breach (we can help with those too…), but for the purposes of this article we’re singling out the poor USB!

What do the figures tell us?

In 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois left 297 unlabelled USB flash drives around the university campus to see what would happen. 98% of the dropped drives were picked up by staff and students, and at least half were plugged into a computer in order to view the content. For a hacker trying to infect a computer network, those are pretty irresistible odds.

USB devices remain a target for cyberthreats. Kaspersky Lab data for 2017 shows that every 12 months or so, around one in four users worldwide is affected by a ‘local’ cyber incident. These are attacks detected directly on a user’s computer and include infections caused by removable media like USB devices.

This short report reviews the current cyberthreat landscape for removable media, particularly USBs, and provides advice and recommendations on protecting these little devices and the data they carry.

The overview is based on detections by Kaspersky Lab’s file protection technologies in the drive root of user computers, with a specific scan filter and other measures applied. It covers malware-class attacks only and does not include detections of potentially dangerous or unwanted programs such as adware or risk tools (programs that are not inherently malicious, but are used to hide files or terminate applications, etc. that could be used with malicious intent). The detection data is shared voluntarily by users via Kaspersky Security Network (KSN).

Key findings

  • USB devices and other removable media are being used to spread cryptocurrency mining software – and have been since at least 2015. Some victims were found to have been carrying the infection for years.
  • The rate of detection for the most popular bitcoin miner, Trojan.Win64.Miner.all, is growing by around one-sixth year-on-year.
  • One in 10 of all users hit by removable media infections in 2018 was targeted with this crypto-miner (around 9.22%, up from 6.7% in 2017 and 4.2% in 2016).
  • Other malware spread through removable media/USBs includes the Windows LNK family of Trojans, which has been among the top three USB threats detected since at least 2016.
  • The 2010 Stuxnet exploit, CVE-2010-2568, remains one of the top 10 malicious exploits spread via removable media.
  • Emerging markets are the most vulnerable to malicious infection spread by removable media – with Asia, Africa and South America among the most affected – but isolated hits were also detected in countries in Europe and North America.
  • Dark Tequila, a complex banking malware reported on August 21, 2018 has been claiming consumer and corporate victims in Mexico since at least 2013, with the infection spreading mainly through USB devices.

In our next article we’ll examine how the threat carried by USBs isn’t static, and hacks are unfortunately becoming more and more sophisticated.

Want to find out more?

As Kaspersky Platinum Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.