IT Support Companies Advice on Protecting Your Business From the Zbot Banking Trojan
The Zbot Trojan collects login details for online banks
, credit and debit card numbers and other passwords. It then uses these to take money out of your account and send it to criminals in Eastern Europe.Industry body UK Payments is working with the Metropolitan Police and Trusteer on the Zbot threat. However UK Payments said that this kind of attack was not a one-off, but that they had "become the norm".
There is an excellent article on the BBC website with more information on Zbot. You can find out some more background by clicking on the following link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10865568
How do you protect your company, if its one of the IT support companies, from this kind of banking fraud when few of your employees will be as vigilant as you?
Protecting Your Business from Zbot and other Malware
1. Have a Policy Have a policy on which sites employees can visit and what they can download onto their PC. Make sure that it is part of your Employee Handbook so that it is enforceable in the event of a problem.
2. Install a Malware package You must install a good anti-virus AND anti-spyware package. Do not go for a cheap or free solution because it is vital that you get daily updates of the most up-to-date protection from the supplier.
3. DO NOT set-and-forget - The biggest mistake I see businesses make is installing the system and forgetting about it. It must be properly set up to protect your business, and it must push out daily uptakes. You cannot afford to give your employees individual control over this. It's not up to them to accept or reject an update. it's just too important to your business for this kind of laissez faire approach.
4. Reporting You need some kind of proactive reporting mechanism telling you how well your security system is working so that you can manage it properly. Without information you could have no hopes of managing it. That rules out the cheap solutions. Decent packages will provide reports and even email selected individuals with alerts.
5. Implement strong passwords It's quite extraordinary the number of times we find user or even system passwords to be "password"! Your password should be a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and characters. You can use your Microsoft Windows server to control this. You can set up a system policy dictating how strong the password must be.
6. Change Passwords Employees come and go and, even worse, write their passwords down and pass them around to other staff. You should have a policy that forces all the staff to change their passwords every 90 days. Again, you can set this up centrally to make it fully automated. Staff won't like it, but then it's not their business, they won't suffer the loss.
7. Get a Good IT Support Partner - Security is a complex area so make sure you have the right IT staff on board (a junior will not do) or find the right IT support companies to outsource the management of this to. If you select the right IT Support partner it will be more effective and cheaper than doing it yourself.
Unfortunately I can't promise these actions will totally prevent infections, but at worst they will reduce them to a trickle.
IT Support Companies Advice on Protecting Your Business From the Zbot Banking Trojan
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