Teramind Release 626
Earlier this month Teramind rolled out their latest update, Release 626, including new features and many improvements to boost efficiency and increase the security and reliability of deployment.
Support for Zoom (Web) IM monitoring has been added to the list of monitored channels, allowing you to track chat conversations, participants and file sharing by your team. Behavior policies and rules can also be applied here to prevent insider threats or data leaks. If you have a heavy network load or many concurrent users, there are two new options to help prevent overloading your infrastructure. These include the max upload bandwidth field to set the maximum upload bandwidth, and the timeframe to upload collected data, which lets you specify a time range for the upload activity. A more robust audit of all activities and interactions of privileged users can be conducted with the new BI Audit report; this report displays similar information that was previously available as well as advanced filters, cloning, details views, and more for a flexible and customized view.
Another new feature, LDAP Groups dataset allows you to filter employees by their Active Directory group(s) and working in conjunction with the Employee, Department, or Computer filters to finetune BI reports according to your organizational setup and employee roles. There are also new and updated features for proactively detecting sensitive content in draft emails, enhancing security with adaptive authentication, and enhancements for the Mac user base. To learn more about the highlights, or to see the complete release notes, visit here for more information.
Text Message Scams
There is a huge surge in sophisticated robotexts bombarding phones and costing unsuspecting people millions of dollars. The text message-based scams are sometimes called “smishing” which is short for SMS phishing.
The scams are tricking mobile phone users out of their money using messages pretending to be from a familiar person or company, and are typically hard or almost impossible to tell from the real thing. Last year, more than 321,000 Americans reported falling for a smishing scam, with total losses of over $326 million, according to data from the US Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is demanding companies start blocking spam texts, as one of the first of several planned steps to combat the fraud.
There is a variety of approaches scammers are trying to trick people out of their money. Some pretend to offer jobs and ask people to transfer money for job supplies, while others pretend to be contacting the wrong person with the hopes of striking up a conversation that leads to longer exchanges and eventually to transferring money. Another common scam involves impersonating a person’s boss and asking for a favor involving purchasing gift cards, then asking for photos of the backs of the gift cards in order to cash the cards. Others pretend to be from a familiar company, like Amazon, or from a bank and try to prompt access to a person’s account in order to wire money out of it.
Text scams are hard to avoid; people tend to react more since it is so immediate. Scammers are also likely using automated systems to blast messages to thousands of phone numbers as a time and often at random. Calls for action to help prevent scammers from taking advantage of people are mounting, as well as pressure on the federal government. Visit here to learn more about some recent attacks, and new protections being put in place.
Anti Virus Software
Which Anti Virus Software Do You Need? Since Microsoft Windows 10 comes with Microsoft Defender, this question has come up more often in the recent past. At MCG, Inc. we are beginning to assess the ongoing needs for additional endpoint anti virus software given the landscape surrounding security of your endpoints.
In addition to Defender on the desktop, Microsoft offers a bundled license for Defender for Business as part of Office 365. This license has an additional cost but there are features included which are an upgrade to the Defender solution included with Windows 10.
Most MCG clients are licensed for our additional security solution from Huntress which includes a great portal for seeing the status of the Defender for Windows 10 software, so the natural question arises whether additional anti virus for the endpoint is required. If you would like to discuss this topic further please reach out to the office to schedule time. There may be an opportunity to reallocate the cost of endpoint AV towards better protection for your endpoints.
