The Silver Bullet in Cyber Security

Let me tell you a small story. Meet Serge. Serge is a hacker. He went on to dark web and bought himself a malware kit called Citadel for $12.

In layman terms he bought a virus software and placed it somewhere on the internet. Then he went onto a popular website in America. That particular website had a comments feature under the articles and Serge discovered he can actually place a script in the comments section. The job of that script is to download and run the malware on the site visitor’s browser.

That’s it.

It took a couple of hours before ‘the popular website’ realised this was happening. In those couple of hours they had a mere 40,000 visitors to the site and a good number of them infected with the malware.

Now the job of the malware is to exploit the existing vulnerability in Java and Adobe programs and look for a very specific info when the user is browsing. The malware is looking for business bank accounts with over $100,000 balance in them and transferring funds to Serge’s bank account. Now look at the odds of a user with business bank account with over $100,000 balance and visiting a particular website while they had an outdated software running on their system. Serge made away with nearly $30,000,000.

Now the affected companies went to sue ‘the popular website’ for having this script on their website. The website guys turned around and said;

‘This happened not because we had a script on our website, but because you are running an outdated software and didn’t do your updates.’

That’s a burn but the good news is that the company had a cyber insurance.

Wow!

They filed a claim for the insurance.

The insurance company turned around and said;

‘You are affected because you are running an outdated software. We cannot pay your claim’.

You get the gist. These affected companies haven’t updated their software/systems in months. The manufacturers have released patches and updates for the vulnerabilities months ago. There are no silver bullets when it comes to Cybersecurity but patching your systems is the closest to the silver bullet.

Patch your systems regularly. Ideally you will need to aim for updating your systems within 14 days of a patch being available. How do you do that you ask?

Leverage the Technology. Get a patch management solution.

It can be the one you have with your Microsoft subscription or a third party tools. These things don’t cost you much money and in fact they will save you from the tons of effort, time, hassle and embarrassment.

Most large businesses are known to have a decent patch management system. For the rest of us, especially SMEs, most Antivirus software are now available with a patch management module. Ask your vendor, or check out our Next-Generation Anti Virus solutions here.

Now go and do your updates!