With states and school districts around the country accelerating plans to return students to full, in-person learning, and the federal government’s strategies to vaccinate teachers by the end of April, it feels like we’re finally turning a major corner on the pandemic. It’s been a long and difficult year for parents, teachers and students alike in trying to balance social distancing with at-home or hybrid learning, but the growing pace of vaccinations and school reopenings means we’re close to finally giving our kids some semblance of normalcy again. And not a moment too soon, according to a n ..read more

XG Firewall v18 includes several performance gains that will breathe new life into your network, enabling you to handle more traffic and better secure it. If you haven’t upgraded to XG Firewall v18 already, you’re going to want to do so as soon as possible to take advantage of the substantial performance benefits waiting for you. What are the gains and where do they come from? Consider these potential performance boosts available by upgrading to XG Firewall v18: Those are some impressive performance improvements! One of the most exciting enhancements to XG Firewall in v18 was the introduction ..read more

The macro virus was downright tony in the late ’90s and has certainly done its best to secure a great spot in the malware hall of fame. Some reports suggest that Melissa, a macro virus variant, has caused damages that amount to $1.1 billion. The ‘wow’ factor is strong in this one considering that we’re talking about malware that was wreaking havoc long before the Internet became a commodity. No, I’m not nostalgic, though the 90s were amazing – macro viruses have made a comeback and, unfortunately, we can’t wish them away. This article is dedicated to this slice of history which instead of rest ..read more

Microsoft’s security updates (the October 2020 Patch Tuesday) have been released. Patches have been rolled out for 87 security bugs. 11 out of the vulnerabilities addressed in this month’s Patch Tuesday received the “critical” ranking from Microsoft, meaning that cybercriminals or malware may leverage them to gain full access over an unpatched endpoint with little to zero user assistance. 75 were listed as “important” and only 1 rated as “moderate”. None were reported as being actively exploited in the wild, but six issues that were previously known yet unpatched before the regularly sche ..read more

The Smurf Attack is one of the oldest, simplest and effective cyber-attacks, one that can draw down many unpleasant consequences for any targeted company. Before trying to understand what is a Smurf Attack, we must first understand the concepts of DoS and DDoS. Denial-of-Service or Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks generally try to make a network’s resources unavailable for legitimate users. This usually happens by sending attacks to it from multiple points of the network. DDoS attacks can be classified as follows: Flood attacks: in this type of attack, multiple compromised ..read more

Security emphasis Given how much working environments have changed this year, we have accelerated our product security investments, taking a more proactive approach.  As a result, this new maintenance release for XG Firewall v18 includes several security and hardening enhancements to better protect your firewall and your data stored within, including SSMK (Secure Storage Master Key) for the encryption of your sensitive data. There’s also a new CLI option to disable Captcha authentication that was previously introduced as a security hardening measure: console> system captcha-authentica ..read more

How many work emails have you sent and received today? Despite the rise of workplace chat and instant messaging apps, for many of us email continues to dominate business communications both internally and externally. Unfortunately, email is also the most common entry point for cyberattacks – sneaking malware and exploits into the network, and credentials and sensitive data out. Email security threats: the new and the enduring The latest data from SophosLabs shows that in September 2020, 97% of the malicious spam caught by our spam traps were phishing emails, hunting for credentials or other in ..read more

SophosLabs researchers Fraser Howard and Andrew O’Donnell stumbled upon an unusual reflective loader attack method last month while hunting through threat telemetry. The attack chain started with a malicious email message that contained some hostile VB scripting code, and concluded by delivering a commodity remote access Trojan named MoDi RAT. These kinds of detections often lead to interesting, divergent attacks, which is what the detection teams are looking for. Diving down the rabbit hole, Howard and O’Donnell discovered a few intriguing twists to the convoluted attack, which inc ..read more

Think you know what you’ve got in the cloud? Think again. The accessibility of the public cloud is a double-edged sword: while it enables teams to spin up new resources in minutes, it also makes it hard for IT teams to keep track of everything that needs to be secured. Take control of your cloud security with a free inventory assessment and security check, powered by Sophos Cloud Optix.  Activate a free trial to get to get 30 days commitment-free usage: Comprehensive inventory of everything you’ve got in the cloud: virtual machines, storage, containers, IAM Users etc. Covers Amazon ..read more

XG Firewall v18 MR1 is now rolling out globally, bringing new levels of visibility, protection, and performance to your firewall.  When the notification for the latest firmware update appears in the console, we strongly encourage everyone to take advantage of the easy process to upgrade. It’s just a few clicks. And if you haven’t already done so, now is the time to upgrade your XG Firewall to v18. As there are many great new features in XG Firewall v18, our blog series over the coming weeks will be highlighting the most important new capabilities, such as the new Xstream Archite ..read more