Overview of the NHS virus and your company
Tens of thousands of organisations have been caught out by a computer virus called WannaCry. The malicious software locks data away and demands a payment of up to $300 (£230) a time before it will restore scrambled files. In the UK, many hospitals fell victim and some health organisations diverted ambulances and cancelled non-essential services as they sought to contain and clean up the infection. However those are just the headlines, this was not an attack specifically targeted at the NHS and any business running Windows desktops and servers are potentially at risk. Infections in more than 99 nations are being reported by security firms. It appears that the hardest hit are Russia and Spain.
Are we at risk from infection ?
The two anti-virus products that we sell, Trend and Bitdefender both have mechanisms for stopping the WannaCry infection. Microsoft also released a bug-fix around 8 weeks ago that prevents the virus from spreading around the network.
However, unless you’re running Opus Insight Pro, it’s not possible for us to give you a report that shows whether all your servers and desktops are patched and that their anti-virus is up-to-date. Opus Insight monitors all your network and can patch, update, install Anti-Virus products and produce traffic-light reports about your network status.
Infections often come in through email and again, our email Spam and AntiVirus filtering in the cloud should filter out any malware infections. This is a brand new virus though so anything is possible, users should be extra vigilant about opening untrusted attachments.
Is our data at risk ?
If a user does get infected then the malware starts encrypting files that the user has access to. At this point it’s the state of your backups that determines the impact the virus will have. Customers with our online backup product are protected as the virus cannot encrypt the backup data across the internet. Customers with Tape backup are also in this category. Customers with Veeam replication are OK although be aware that Veeam will replicate encrypted files so we may need to go back a couple of revisions to get to the unencrypted ones.
Customers with removable USB hard drives are at risk however as the files on there will most likely be encrypted just like every other file on the hard drive of the server. You should consider upgrading to our online, local speedvault or Veeam solutions.
