Category: Protection
There’s a war going on in cyberspace. Criminal masterminds are reaching across continents into your office and taking files hostage. This faceless enemy can cause havoc to your business by encrypting important files, and demanding a fee to release them. This criminal activity is called ransomware, and last year 40% of New Zealand businesses were impacted by it (PWC).
Things got off to a shaky start a couple of weeks ago when the 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the upper South and lower North Islands, leaving a trail of damage and disruption in its wake. Reminiscent of the chaos and disruption suffered in the Christchurch earthquakes, Wellington experienced some of the similar after effects with several large office buildings evacuated, some now planned for demolition.
We’re now seeing phishing emails being sent from the @post-xero.com domain. The full From address is messaging-service@post-xero.com, rather than Xero’s legitimate messaging-service@post.xero.com address. We’ve started the process to get the @post-xero.com domain taken down.
CryptoLocker a relatively new family of virus/ransomware and is catching out a few too many unsuspecting victims. It is based on extorting money from infected users who are tricked into running it. The victim receives an email with a password protected ZIP file often purporting to be from a courier company. CryptoLocker hijacks and corrupts users’ business documents and demands them to pay a ransom (with a time limit to send the payment).