NCTCS

Don’t be these folks...

Heads up: I am seeing a ton of scam emails going around today that look like they’re from local banks or governmental agencies. When you open the attachment it installs ransomware on your PC and encrypts everything, at which point, if you don’t have an offsite back up, your choice would be to pay the ransom or lose your stuff. I’m betting similar emails that look like they’re from insurance companies will join the mix soon.... If you weren’t expecting an attachment, don’t open it. If you aren’t sure then call the sender and ask.

Great information about staying safe on public networks.

Your Best Out Of The Office Messages. OOFs, so ubiquitous and so boring. You can do better. My Fav: "If you need me you’ll need to send a carrier pigeon."

If you’ve heard about some of the issues with WiFi security, here’s a great article that explains what we know so far.

How Are Your Passwords, Part 2: There has been a lot of buzz lately about using passphrases as opposed to passwords, and there are some excellent arguments to be made for it. But selection is critical - common phrases are still easily hackable. It's better to use something like, say, a song lyric, and include punctuation or numbers to satisfy complexity requirements. For instance: "There’s still time to change the road you’re on" has upper and lower case letters as well as a special character which would satisfy most current complexity requirements. Or how about: "1 is the loneliest number that you'll ever do" You get the idea.

How Are Your passwords, Part 1? I would add to this, 1qazXSW@ - it has made most common passwords lists in the last couple of years.

Petya ransomware is spreading fast this morning - spread through attachments. http://www.nctcs.com/new-cyber-threat-spreading-fast-petya-

WannaCry Ransomware is Spreading Rapidly - Here's What You Can Do to Keep Your Systems Secure.

Tech support scam popups have been on the rise lately, but more so than usual in the last several days. They seem to have infected some local news sites (in particular the Sacramento Bee) and/or their advertising partners. When you are viewing content on these sites, you may get popups warning you that your computer is infected with malware, or that it has a hardware or software error, and advising you to contact "Microsoft Technicians" to resolve the issue. I've included sev...eral examples of the types of popups you may see. (There are also some Mac variants of this out there.) Long story short - Microsoft isn't monitoring your computer's health and they would never alert you of an issue with popups like this (or by calling your home, as several clients have also reported). If you do receive these popups, do not click them and do not call the number. Save what you are working on and then restart your PC - that will generally resolve the issue. You may also want to avoid the infected site for a few days so they can get the issue resolved. Lastly, you might go ahead and run a virus scan after restarting. If that doesn't take care of it let me know and I will come out and clean up any malware left on your PC.

Some great information here: