Happy New Year to my readers
Dec 31, 2017
Well, 2017 is ending and 2018 is coming on in! Somehow we made it through another crazy year. We fended off all manner of online threats, including a flood of ransomware and bitcoin miners. Many of us had our credit information compromised by the Equifax data breach.
Twenty seventeen also revealed how insecure many of the wireless security cameras and household smart devices are. Called the IoT, these remotely accessible Internet connected devices were often shipped with easily hacked administrator credentials that allowed cybercriminals and hackers to take control over these devices and draft them into huge botnets. In turn, these botted cameras and smart devices were used in gigantic DDoS attacks against Internet service providers, web hosts, cloud services, Governments, businesses and online gamers. Some online cameras shipped with secondary remote access credentials hardcoded into the firmware, rendering any security oriented changes made by the owners moot.
Some of the supposedly most secure organizations in the World got hacked and had invaluable data exfiltrated. These included the NSA, who, through a combination of misplaced trust in their contractors and targeted email scams, had some of the most clandestine espionage tools ever developed stolen by hackers from abroad. Those hacking tools were unleashed on the Internet not long after they were pilfered. Some even ended up in the hands of North Korean hackers and other foreign state actors.
One trend I noticed that improved was people becoming more aware of online threats. People who never considered securing their devices and computers before were asking me what they needed to do to remain safe from these online threats, especially ransomware. In the previous years I would recommend that they invest in a top name anti-virus program and back it up with Malwarebytes Anti-malware (MBAM). But, there was often a struggle between those programs and the anti-virus programs often forced the uninstallation of MBAM. Then, on December 8, 2016. the makers of MBAM ramped up their game and announced the release of a new version: 3.0, which incorporated multiple security sub-systems in one package. These included anti-ransomware, anti-exploit anti-rootkit, anti-junk and the anti-malware engines. They also changed the name from MBAM to just Malwarebytes'. I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of the new Malwarebytes Premium.
I hope you all stay healthy and happy and safe from computer malware and Internet threats.
Happy New Year, y'all! See you next year!
