The ILOVEYOU Virus, also known as, the Love Bug, is a computer worm that infected over 10 million Windows computers in May of 2000. The virus was an email that went out to users with the subject line “ILOVEYOU” and the attachment “Love Letter For You.txt.vbs”. This resulted in users thinking this was a normal and safe file to open, however, they were sadly mistaken. When opened, the file would run a script that damages the local system it was running on and spread to other users by sending itself to the user’s contacts within their devices.
What Does This Mean For My SMB?
In order to not fall victim to attacks like these and current threats,, you need to be doing these things to protect your sensitive information:
- Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.
- Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.
- Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.
- Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.
- In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections, etc) or prohibiting their use entirely.
- If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
- Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.
Most of these recommendations are built into CyberHoot. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.
Source: Symantec