Enhancing Visitor Security



Beware of the dangers of
allowing access to Wi-Fi

If you have visitors to your premises they will sometimes ask if they can use your Wi-Fi. Usually you will agree as you want to help someone else out or not appear rude.

There is a potentially dangerous security flaw with this though. In effect, it’s like giving someone the keys to your house and trusting them not to steal or damage anything.

The source of the risk is what might be on their computer. So if their laptop or tablet has viruses or malware then you have allowed it access to your server. This is particularly risky if the visitor can send emails using your mail server. It is possible that the malware on their device will send itself to everyone on the contact list saved on the server, meaning you have helped spread a dangerous piece of software and probably getting yourself blacklisted as a result.

Removing yourselves from blacklists is technically complex, expensive and time-consuming but the most immediate impact is that until you resolve it, emails you send will go into spam filters, so may never get through.

But in the worst-case scenario you may have allowed malware with criminal intent on to your server and therefore into your systems.

Prevention is much better than cure in this case and there are two potential solutions if you want to continue allow visitor access to your Wi-Fi. If you don’t, then there isn’t an issue so long as you don’t give them your password.

Firstly, if you have a mail server, configure access so that visitors cannot send email from it. They can still use the server to download messages but not send or reply, which prevents your mail server from transmitting any malware which might be contained on their computer. This doesn’t mean they can’t send email when they are at your premises, it means they will have to use their own ISP's webmail facility instead.

The second solution is to have a router with what’s known as a VLAN. This creates an isolated area that visitors can use, which is separated from your systems. So even if their device is infected with something, it cannot gain access to your system because it is fenced off.

The VLAN approach works whether you have a mail server or not. But if you do have a mail server we would suggest also using the first approach, i.e. configuring the mail server to refuse access to visitors so that they have to use webmail.

Recent Computer Scam of ‘Significant Risk’



Remain Vigilant & Ensure Virus
Protection & Firewalls are up-to-date

Vigilance is always required when looking after your IT systems. There are always new scams trying to infiltrate your systems and damage them, or even steal from you. 
We regularly have to repair systems which have been affected so we encourage everyone to make sure they have up-to-date protection, but users also have to play their part.

One simple piece of advice is to never open an email with an attachment unless you know exactly who it is from and are expecting it. Be particularly careful of .zip or .exe files. Opening these can unleash a piece of software called a Trojan. Named after the Trojan Horse of Greek mythology, a Trojan needs to be allowed in to your systems but once there it can wreak havoc. One classic access route is the user opening a zipped (.zip) or executable file (.exe). An email with an executable file often looks like it contains a software program so might appear to be offering you something useful.

A cunning trick used by some viruses and Trojans is to send itself to everyone on an infected computer’s contact list. So you might receive an email from someone you recognise and think it is genuine, but it could actually be a mechanism for spreading a Trojan. This is why the advice is to make sure you are expecting the file, rather than merely recognising the name. If in doubt, call the person and ask if they deliberately sent it to you or not, before you open it.

One recent example was ‘cryptolocker’, which was serious enough for the National Crime Agency to issue a ‘significant risk’ alert. Cryptolocker encrypts files on your computer, such as photographs, documents, databases, PowerPoint presentations – anything that might be useful to you – and then issues a ransom notice on your computer, giving you 72 hours to pay up. If you don’t, the encryption key will be deleted which means you will permanently lose access to the files. It’s fiendishly clever but also an absolute nightmare if you get trapped by it.

We’ve written several articles in the past about protection, such as Spam and Viruses, Remote Security and Secure Remote Working, but the key pieces of advice are:

• Make sure you have a high-quality protection system in place with virus protection and firewalls. Speak to a reputable IT support company if you need assistance.
• Keep your protection up-to-date. A good system will do this automatically in the background but you will need to periodically renew it to maintain your protection.
• Keep an offsite back-up and perform it regularly. In the event of being held to ransom by cryptolocker, for example, you could dump the old computer and reload everything you have on it to a new one from your back-up. It needs to be offsite and remote though, as cryptolocker will seek out any drives connected to your computer, such as external hard drives or cloud solutions and also encrypt files found there.
• Exercise sensible precaution as you would do in your own home. Would you let an unexpected visitor into your home without checking their credentials first? You should use the same principles when letting files and data into your computer systems.

Business Continuity and Disaster Planning

Continuity & Disaster Planning

The news is regularly full of reasons why businesses need to look at continuity planning.

Whether it’s the recent riots, the fires at Peckforton Castle and Chester Enterprise Centre, or floods following rains, there are plenty of threats to your business.

It could even be something as simple as road works cutting the phone cable to your office, bringing down not just your telephone lines but also your internet connection and access to emails.

Have you thought how you would cope if something like this happened to you? And if you have thought about it, have you set up robust systems to protect yourself and tested them?

As with many of these things, the first thing to look at is your requirements. If you run a 24/7 real-time operation with hundreds of people depending on you, then your business continuity is vitally important. But if you have an office because it’s convenient but in reality everyone could work from home remotely using their mobiles and laptops, then it’s not such an issue, providing it didn’t last for a long time and you had a suitable back-up routine.
Here are some of the continuity arrangements that you might like to think about.

Back-ups. These ensure things are recoverable if anything happens, but they don’t stop the event from happening or reduce the impact. Remember though that your back-up storage should be off-site. If your premises has a fire or flood and your back-up is stored on-site, then you can’t get at it so it will have been completely pointless from a continuity perspective. You want to be able to load up and get going again as quickly as possible.

Physical security. As prevention is better than cure, you want to stop as many dangerous elements as possible from getting at your IT. This includes making sure everything is locked and physically protected, but also the online aspects. Hackers can access your system whenever you sign onto an internet connection so make sure all your firewalls, antivirus and spam protection are up-to-date – automated updates are usually provided every day. Don't forget about password protection and screen locks.

Mirrored Services. If the priority is to carry on working seamlessly (known as ‘business continuity’), rather than recovering quickly (known as ‘disaster planning’), you will need some form of mirrored application. In effect, this is a duplicate of your systems that would be activated if your normal operations went down. This could be as simple as an email continuity system, an overflow telephone system to a telephone answering service, wireless internet or a full mirrored server providing seamless service to staff and customers.

We’ve produced a couple of articles on different forms of business continuity and disaster planning which you might find useful (What is Disaster Planning & Business Continuity and How to help your Business Survive Disasters), and we also have a blog post on a specific form of mirrored servers – virtualisation.