Ransom racket hits Brisbane businesses

Business operations without having a good backup and security plans is the work of shoddy IT personal.

I guess that is the result of the perception that MS leaves in the minds of some IT personal by its repetitious claims of Windows being more secure.

Backups would help but the security problems in the OS are the source of most such problems. It is time for them to look for alternatives but I guess they don't know better.

> Business operations without having a good backup and security plans is the work of shoddy IT personal

Personnel, but otherwise I agree. The best security can be beaten however, so backups become even more essential.

It's always possible these are small enough businesses that they don't have an IT staff, however.

Quoting:Backups would help but the security problems in the OS are the source of most such problems. It is time for them to look for alternatives but I guess they don't know better.

More effective hardening of infrastructure OS's (e.g., servers, firewall/routers, ...etc.) would certainly help in this regard. AAMOF, the section of this piece entitled 'Police are urging small businesses to consider the following steps to help prevent virus attacks:' could be a good starting point as far as effectively addressing these very problems.

A question to ask is why businesses in other countries, e.g., in China and in Japan, have only minimally reported similar "ransom rackets"?? It would easily seem that businesses in countries such as these would make extremely lucrative targets for those stealthy crackers willing to go beyond the low-hanging fruit of security-unaware Brisbane businesses.

I posted this to thr Brisbane Times. We'll see if it gets past the editors.

Quoting:Of course, if these businesses and Medical Centres had been using a Linux based operating system , such as Red Hat Enterprise Server or Ubuntu Business Server or SuSE Enterprise Server on their Servers and preferably a Linux based Desktop operating System such as Ubuntu or Red Hat/Fedora or Linux Mint on their desk top systems, instead of Microsoft Windows, this would never have happened.

And... If they had been doing proper backups of their data, even with Microsoft Windows, they would not have lost All of their data, only the most recent few hours or day.

These criminals depend on people and businesses using Microsoft Windows for their Information Technology needs, it makes it so very easy for them.

@vainveenr,

>> More effective hardening of infrastructure OS's (e.g., servers, firewall/routers, ...etc.) would certainly help in this regard.

I would think that USERS would be among the weakest links here, rather than just "hardening" things. Hardening can only go so far with phishing attacks, clickjacking, and other really good types of devious social engineering tricks directed right at internal users.

2c

> I would think that USERS would be among the weakest links here,

That's normally the case, yes.

IME, no matter what OS is used, the system administrators and security people tell management what is needed and management refuses to allocate the time or the resources or simple doesn't want the inconvenience of security. Then, when they have a security incident they blame the same systems administrators and security people for not preventing the incident in the first place. I've walked into shops as a consultant to do forensics or clean up the mess afterwards and people were fired who had, in fact, done their job properly and warned management. It was a pure management failure and yet management stayed.

After the clean up did they implement proper security procedures and best practices? Of course not.