GTS Solutions Blog

One of the most enticing credentials that hackers desire is your credit card number, along with its expiration date and the code on the back. Hackers are also willing to go great lengths to achieve their goal of stealing these credentials, even so far as to make physical changes to automatic teller machines (ATMs) to do so. In fact, hackers will often install skimming devices on ATMs that are so subtle that they can be difficult to detect.

While many youngsters enjoy it when their school shuts down, this was likely not the case in Flathead Valley, Montana, where the cybercriminal group ‘TheDarkOverlord Solutions’ targeted the entire Columbia Falls school district. This attack caused the three-day closure and otherwise disrupted over 30 schools, and the personal information of teachers, students, and school administrators was supposedly to be released if the group didn’t receive a ransom payment.

Man matching wits with computer isn’t new territory. In 1830, a locomotive raced a horse to see which was superior in terms of speed and distance. 1956 saw the first time a human played chess against a computer. Today, the time has come when an artificial intelligence has begun to break into a new territory that was dominated by humans for thousands of years: crime.

Fact: your business will always be susceptible to various security threats in at least some capacity. It’s up to you to counter these threats before falling victim to them. To help you with this, we’ll go over the top five threats that you need to be prepared for.

“Hacker” is a word that can bring up many powerful impressions in people. It may very well bring up images of a pale super genius hunched over a keyboard, awash in dim blue light, as it does for many people. However, this extremely specific image does little but pigeonhole the many hackers in the real world into this dramatized caricature.

In reality, there are many different kinds of hacker, each with a preferred target and reason for doing what they do. For your part, it helps to be familiar with the 10 types of hackers that are to be found in reality.

Amateurs

• Script Kiddies: There’s a reason that this type of hacker is under the “amateur” heading. These are the hackers who are capable of little more than piggybacking onto larger efforts, or dabbling in the more basic forms of cybercrime. They are little more than nuisances, compared to their hacking compatriots.

The Good Guys

• White Hats: These ethical hackers, usually security researchers, are those that help the average user by using their skills to keep threats at bay.

Political Players

• Hacktivists: Using DDoS attacks and website vandalism to humiliate and hobble their targets, these actors are usually part of a larger group, working towards an ideologically driven common cause.
• Nationalist Hackers: These actors are those that, thanks to their sympathies and patriotic motives, are often given a pass by law enforcement.
• Nation State Agents: These actors typically  for a government body, usually in a military or intelligence capacity. They have access to great capital resources, but will not hesitate to use common tools as well.

The Criminals

• Cyber Mercenaries: These are hackers-for-hire, who will be brought on to assist other cybercriminals for a share of whatever ill-gotten gains there are to be had.
• Repeat Offenders: These hackers are skilled, yet disorganized, which keeps them from obtaining the profits that other varieties of hackers do.
• Organized Crime: These are criminal organizations that focus on cybercrime, with a hierarchy that allows them to reap great profits from their schemes.
• Malicious Insider: These are the criminals who sit inside your walls, actively working to sabotage your efforts and leak critical information to your competition, often for personal motivations.

These malicious insiders are easily the most dangerous threat to an SMB, but that doesn’t mean that the others don’t cause problems as well. In order to keep them all at bay, you will not only need to encourage diligence in the workplace, but also protect that workplace with comprehensive security solutions.

The experts at GTSS are ready to assist you in securing your business assets against external influences. Call (803) 298-3008 to get started.

It’s not an understatement to suggest that hackers are a hindrance to business. They take what doesn’t belong to them, and worse than that, they use that stolen information to make off with money, misrepresent individual actions, and ultimately, just cause a degree of added entropy that any business simply doesn’t need. Recently, with the hacker group Anonymous consistently in the news and dozens of corporate hacks resulting in millions of people’s personal information being compromised, hackers have been an increased part of the public consciousness.

Hackers have the ability to cripple systems and steal important (or sensitive) data, and if you’re not careful your business could become their latest victim. Here are five ways that you can make it more difficult for hackers to infiltrate your systems and steal your data.

Windows is perhaps the most common workplace computing tool, and hackers have been trying for decades to uncover holes in its security. In some cases, like with unsupported operating systems, they’ve succeeded. However, Microsoft’s latest addition to their OS family, Windows 10, seems to have exceptionally potent built-in security measures, many of which have the hackers at the Black Hat conference scratching their heads and scrambling to find threats to talk about.

The Internet is a fascinating and wonderful place full of great, informative resources and websites, but it’s also home to online markets for illegal and unethical practices. These hotbeds of criminal activity are a danger not only to your business, but to everyone who uses the Internet.

2015 saw a significant increase in high-profile hacking attacks in organizations of all disciplines: healthcare, government, and even large entertainment companies all fell victim to data breaches. In light of these attacks, valuable lessons can be learned through analyzing the types of records that were stolen. In 2015, over half of all records exposed to hackers were passwords and email addresses.

The Internet of Things is practically omnipresent in today’s environment, and many commercial products not only connect to the Internet, but they also come with an app. Due to this type of integration growing more popular, the world is starting to see Internet-connected products that really don’t have much to gain from their connectivity.

IT can be like baseball. When a team is up to bat in a game of baseball, the team at bat is allowed to keep two coaches on the field. They are called the first base coach and the third base coach. While both coaches’ responsibilities mostly have to do with baserunning, the third base coach also takes on the responsibility of relaying “signs” from the manager in the dugout to the batter at the plate.

We all know that hackers are never good news. All they want to do is ruin someone’s day by planting a threat in an innocent person’s PC or steal some data from a business. However, some hackers could potentially have much more dangerous (and deadly) agendas, like sabotaging hospital equipment.

There’s a wicked string of malware on the Internet that locks users out of their browser and directs them to call a phone number. That phone number reaches hackers who have set up a subterfuge as an IT support company. If this happens to you, even if you are in the middle of something important, do not call the phone number.