Common Sense, Software Upgrades, Can Prevent Malicious Software

Ransomware called Wannacry attacked banks, hospitals and businesses in dozens of countries last week.

Eric Brown serves as assistant director of Tennessee Tech’s Cybersecurity Education Research and Outreach Center.

He said ransomware is software that lets a hacker take over your computer system and hide your data. The only way to get it back is to pay the ransom, usually in internet currency called Bitcoin.

“This is a problem for anyone that uses the internet, our society is a very connected society, commercial sectors, industrial, government sectors, one report said this last one affected over 74 countries, another report said more than 100 countries were affected, but these attacks happen every day,” Brown said.

Just like in the real world, some common sense actions can save you a virtual problems.

“They can do several things, one thing that made the Wannacry attack of this past week so easy to expand, many of the systems it touched made use of a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. A patch had been released for the vulnerability in March, but the patch had never been applied. Some of these places were using older versions of Windows, all the way back to Windows XP which had been out of maintenance for three years or better. So they were either using old software or unpatched software. That patching that comes up, the annoying little box that comes up and says ‘click here to update,’ that’s not a bad thing. The other thing is be very cautious and use common sense in your email. If you receive a strange email that has an attachment saying “here’s the file you’ve asked for” and you haven’t asked that individual for a file, don’t click on it. If you receive an attachment from someone you know, but you didn’t ask them for anything, question it, find out if they really sent it. It’s common sense things that can actually stop a lot of these exploits, use common sense in the physical world, use common sense in the cyber world,” Brown said.

Good virus and malware protection software can help keep malicious software off your computer, Brown said.