Every day there’s another news story about another security breach at another large business. Earlier this year it was Target, the giant American retailer, who suffered a spectacular cybersecurity attack. 40 million user accounts with credit card and debit card info were compromised. It’s estimated that this cyber intrusion could end up costing Target over a billion dollars in payment card claims. A few weeks ago it was Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding platform, who had its investors’ usernames, encrypted passwords, and e-mail addresses stolen.
Besides Target and Kickstarter.com, cyberthefts have also occurred at Snecma, Michael’s, Neiman-Marcus, Sally Beauty Supply, Experian, Arizona Public Employees’ Pension Fund, Snapchat, Evernote, Dropbox, Yahoo, and many many others. In fact, Symantec Security has estimated that cybercrime costs businesses over $113 billion per year1.
Basic Cybersecurity Measures
The best security measures can’t beat commonsense: having unique complex passwords on each machine, not publicly posting these passwords on the company bulletin board, not being lured by phishing emails, having independent security measures on all your machines, and routinely cleaning out your systems to remove any potential threats. Since the longer an attack remains undetected, the greater the damage will eventually be, it’s best to have a reset software installed. If cyberthieves hack into a network and implant malware, without a reset software this implant could remain resident on the machines indefinitely. These intruders could otherwise be eavesdropping on the host machine until they discover something worth stealing. As writing such malware becomes more lucrative, cyber-criminals have been getting increasingly sophisticated, disciplined, and patient. According to Verizon DBIR, 66% of such security breaches go undetected for at least a few months2.
While a lot of companies concentrate on server security they have generally neglected endpoint protection. But most break-ins occur on the individual PCs. So it’s critically important to have a robust security measure on these endpoint devices. Your staff’s individual PCs are the largest source of hacking attempts and could be the locus of gapping vulnerabities to viruses, worms, spyware, adware, rootkits, keyloggers, dialers, spyware, et cetra.
The strength of a network’s security is based on its weakest link. Once hackers have gained access to a single node on your network they can then usually hop onto other nodes from this single access point. Clearly, such cyberattacks can cause serious disruption or destruction to your business. So what’s an overstressed and overburdened IT administrator to do?
The Shortcomings of Anti-virus Programs
The problem with firewalls, antivirus programs, and other threat monitoring software is that they simply attempt to restrict programs containing certain flagged code or url redirects that lack certification based on their current library of malware definitions. If the infection type is new then, of course, these anti-virus programs may completely fail to detect the intrusion. And new viruses, worms, spyware, adware, rootkits, keyloggers, dialers, spyware, et cetra, seem to pop up every day. If the intruder comes disguised as a welcomed guest (that is, as part of a legitimate looking program) and the user has inadvertently already executed the malware then there may not be much the virus-scanning software can do after the fact. And the viral code can remain resident on the machines indefinitely and completely evade discovery and even thwart all attempts by the security program to remove it. Such anti-malware applications also seem to require an update with the newest definitions almost every day if not every hour and always seem to be lagging in their pursuit of technologically advanced attacks. Anti-virus utilities give a false sense of security as many of these new intrusion attempts are regularly successful in bypassing all such cybersecurity measures.
Recently, this shortcoming of such traditional cybersecurity measures was illustrated by Cryptolocker, a vicious trojan horse that came hidden in packaged files. Cryptolocker was able to completely evade discovery by the best malware detection software since it was disguised as a legitimate UPS attachment or as originating from other legitimate businesses. But there is a software called RollBack Rx that has been able to completely remove the Cryptolocker randsomware and even recover any salvageable files from infected computers by returning to an earlier point in time. So RollBack Rx should be an integral part of your cybersecurity planning.
RollBack Rx: The PC Time Machine
RollBack Rx is an instant recovery software. RollBack Rx completely restores up to four internal harddrives on a bit-for-bit basis back to any one of hundreds of snapshots. Every last byte is returned to how it was when the snapshot was taken. This gives you a much more robust and comprehensive recovery capability than the default alternative, Windows System Restore. With RollBack Rx all your computing assets can even be set to continually return to this predefined configuration every time the machine restarts, on logoff, on any fixed schedule, or after a period of inactivity. If these endpoint PCs are thin clients that access and save data to cloud servers you can set up roaming profiles that will be retained even if the system is roaming and disconnected from the network.
RollBack Rx is the fastest and most reliable enterprise system restore software available today.
Large networks of RollBack Rx client computers can easily be controlled and centrally administrated from a single interface using the free enterprise-level Remote Management Console. RollBack Rx also offers other additional tools to facilitate the management of public IT assets. You can also pick and choose which folders you would like to be recorded and which folders should remain unchanged even when the machines are restored back to any number of prior system states (or “snapshots”). Once the user has logged out of the system you can set it to return to any one of these snapshots, discarding unwanted user changes: including erased files, installed software, downloaded spyware, adware, viruses, Trojan horses, et cetra. You can ensure privacy on the PCs and completely prevent identify theft and keyboard logging since no sensitive information is left behind. All the automatic data caches are cleared, all cookies wiped clean, all auto-complete passwords forgotten, all surfing activity deleted, and other personal data is automatically removed. RollBack Rx desktop security software has government-grade AES 256-bit encryption absolutely prevents unauthorized access. This allows you, the IT manager, to make the most of your limited time, staff, and computing resources by ensuring more uptime and productivity while drastically reducing support costs and security breaches.
And since employees today are increasingly working on tablets rather than desktops, RollBack Rx is now available for Windows Surface as well.