Month: June 2017

Petya Cyber Attack: How To Protect Your Organization Against It!

Bobby Varghese

Petya ransomware is a part of a new wave of cyber attacks that has hit enterprise networks across the world. Ukraine and Russia are the worst affected, though the attack has also impacted some companies in other Western European countries, US and India.

Researchers are calling Petya a wiper and not a ransomware. The aim of this wiper being mass destruction of data and not collection of money from victims and enterprises. This was first reported by Matt Suiche, founder of the cyber security firm Comae. You can read his detailed blogpost on Medium (blog.comae.io) explaining why Petya is a wiper, not a ransomware. Cyber security firm Kaspersky has also come to the same conclusion.

What is the difference between a Wiper and a Ransomware?

A wiper and a ransomware differ in their intent and motive. The goal of a wiper is to destroy and damage data, excluding any possibility of restoration whereas the goal of a ransomware is to make money and it can restore the modifications it makes on your system.

How to protect your organization against it?

Common delivery methods for such malwares are via phishing emails or scams and the payload requires local administrator access to execute. Most major antivirus companies like Symantec and Kaspersky claim that their software has been updated to actively detect and protect against “Petya” infections. Keeping your Windows up to date – at the very least by installing March’s critical patch MS17 – 010 – will defend your system and also protect against future attacks with different payloads.

Organizations need to be aware of how threats affect their organizations through gaps in their infrastructure, unsafe application updates, or infected web adverts. Here are some protective measures that you can take to protect your organisation from Petya and similar attacks:

  1. Install the latest Microsoft patches, including MS17-010 which patches the SMB vulnerability.

    2. Read more →

Transform Your Business With Microsoft Dynamics 365

Bobby Varghese

Today, organizations need intelligent business solutions to grow, evolve, meet the changing customer needs and market requirements to capture new opportunities in the process.

But, there are times when

  • Businesses are worried about their continuity due to employee movements, competition, inherent inefficiencies, low productivity, etc.
  • There are issues with Inventory Management
  • Improper sales forecasts are made
  • There is a mismatch between the demand and supply
  • Employees get lost mid-way when multiple tasks pile up and affecting the business productivity

What organizations need are intelligent applications that work together seamlessly over the cloud. This is where Microsoft Dynamics 365 comes into the picture. It allows business applications to work together and smoothly across CRM and ERP systems and offers business intelligence, flexibility, and growth and transforms businesses in such a way that they can respond to the specific business requirements efficiently through custom-built apps. Microsoft Dynamics 365 lets you manage and run your business while enabling you to:

  • Engage with customers by building personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints,
  • Empower their employees by offering familiar tools to turn big data into actionable insights,
  • Optimize their operations with the help of predictive guidance through intelligent applications, and
  • Transform products and business models by making them more proactive.

Read more →

Achieving Application Portability with PaaS

Bobby Varghese

Today, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is increasingly gaining popularity as a Public Cloud offering compared to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) because of its simple operations and lower costs. These days, most PaaS customers get locked-in because of the specialized OS or middleware features but for the customers looking for flexibility in working across multiple Cloud platforms and providers, a portable PaaS environment is a feasible choice.

Before we see how organizations can implement a portable PaaS model, let’s first see the primary reasons behind the adoption of PaaS services:

  • Lesser costs of licensing and supporting because of the pre-installed OS and middleware.
  • Streamlined Hybrid Cloud deployment with standardized application services.
  • Improved application performance and functionality by creating a PaaS environment within the IaaS Cloud using the available web services.

How a portable PaaS model fairs across these three areas and how it moves within the various cloud and private environments is important but a single PaaS approach might not be enough to address this. Thus, enterprises need to prioritize their PaaS goals and combine different options to create the desired PaaS environment.

 

Here are the top 4 ways to achieve a Portable PaaS model:

Adopt Container Technology for Application Hosting: The container architectures share the Operating System, but the middleware and file system elements can be copied to each container to standardize the middleware across container images. This allows the creation of specialized container images for the application and the component which can then be moved across environments to be run on any container system hosted in Cloud or the Data Center. Read more →