There is another ransomware attack that has so far that hit 74 countries around the globe. This new ransomware is named WCry (also referenced under names WannaCry, WannaCrypt0r, WannaCrypt, or Wana Decrypt0r). The vulnerability was discovered in pretty much all the Microsoft operating systems, from Vista to Windows 10 and from Windows 2008 to Windows 2016 servers.

Microsoft released an emergency fix yesterday Monday May 8^th to address the critical security vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine which affects a number of Microsoft products, including Windows Defender, Windows Intune Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint, Microsoft Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection. These tools are enabled by default in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and Windows Server 2012

Monday night, researchers sounded the alarm about a critical 0-day threat known as CVE-2017-0199 in Microsoft Word that allowed booby-trapped Dridex phishing attacks to be sent to millions of employees claiming to be a PDF sent to them by their company copier. This one is particularly bad because it bypasses exploit mitigations built into Windows, doesn't require your employee to enable macros, works even against Windows 10 which is Redmond's most secure OS yet, and this exploit works on most or all Windows versions of Word.

When cryptoware attacks your organization, it is often too late to do anything about it -
ransomware deploys incredibly fast. Once on a machine, it can take just minutes or even seconds to encrypt files and make them inaccessible. If the machine has a shared network drive, those files can be encrypted, too. What do security analysts suggest these days? Plan, Pray or Pay.

Sure signs you’ve been hacked

*** Based on the article “11 sure signs you’ve been hacked” BY ROGER A. GRIMES

In today’s “threatscape”, antivirus software provides little piece of mind. In fact, antimalware scanners on the whole are horrifically inaccurate, especially with exploits less than 24 hours old. After all, malicious hackers and malware can change their tactics at will. Swap a few bytes around, and a previously recognized malware program becomes unrecognizable.

We recently had one of our primary Microsoft architects attend the Microsoft Ingnite conference in Chicago. Here is what we learned are the major announcements from Microsoft from least import to most important.  

#5. Advanced Threat Analytics Software as part of Windows 10