Technology Tips: October 2022 Edition

#Tips

Skyward IT Services

by Skyward IT Services

Skyward IT Services Network and Infrastructure Security Specialists

Read time:

3 sweet treats to help schools stay safe during Cyber Security Month

🍭 Is your district truly disaster-ready? Take a look at this article and answer 5 important questions. If your disaster recovery situation is a little scary, we have just the tools to help.

🍭 Your team is spookily talented at what they do, but they are educators, not IT professionals. You can help keep your district safe by blocking access to suspicious websites. Here’s how you can stop malicious sites dead in their tracks with Google Chrome and Safari.

🍭 Teachers, students, and staff are busy and might not notice a potentially harmful email. Implementing an external sender email banner can be a helpful red flag before links accidentally get clicked. Here's how you can do it in Office 365.

Know what lurks in the cyber shadows

Hackers attack in more ways than you’d think. Here are five attacks you may not have heard of.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack: An attacker overwhelms a target server with traffic to disrupt it. To protect your district from this form of attack, have data backups stored at servers in different data centers.
Zero-day Exploit: Hackers will take advantage of a bad situation and make it worse by finding a vulnerability in an application and targeting large organizations that are using it. Keeping your software up to date will greatly help here!
Drive-by Attack: A victim visits a website that infects their devices with malware. This is very common and unfortunately effective. To help avoid drive-by attacks, install an ad-blocker and disable Java and JavaScript in your browser.
SQL Injection: Cyber criminals exploit HTML from a SQL database to make queries that can create, delete, or modify data. Ensuring web developers have sanitized all inputs will help minimize risk.
Cryptojacking: Hackers compromise a computer to mine cryptocurrency. While they may not be stealing data, they are using a lot of district resources (specifically internet and power). This is another example of why keeping software and passwords up to date is crucial.

Spooky hacking stats

If you’ve ever doubted the importance of cyber security, let these ten spooky stats help you realize monster hackers are lurking in every corner of the web.

Most hackers only need 5 hours or less to break into enterprise environments.
1 in 3 homes with computers are infected with malicious software.
600,000 Facebook accounts are hacked every single day.
44% of millennials have been victims of crime online in the last year.
Cyber fatigue affects as much as 42% of companies.
On average, only 5% of companies’ folders are properly protected.
In 2021, data breaches exposed 22 billion records.
95% of cyber security breaches are caused by human error.
57% of organizations see daily or weekly phishing attempts.
$17,700 is lost every minute due to a phishing attack.

Malware of the Month

$60 million: the ransom amount demanded of UK car dealer Pendragon to pay cyber gang LockBit. This ransom comes after the company recently received $440 million from a shareholder in September. This is the second largest ransom amount to date, just shy of the $70 million demanded from US software company Kaseya in 2021.