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San Antonio Managed IT Services providers like Node, LLC experience the impacts of cyber attacks every day. I know from personal experience that the attackers are sophisticated, well coordinated, and often exceed the capability profile of most San Antonio Managed IT Services providers in the region. The attackers are well versed in a variety of programming languages, attack methodologies, and many times come equipped with very fresh exploits that cut through the common defenses faster, and with less effort than we have ever seen.

So How Does It Work? How Does A Company Become The Target Of A Cyber Attack?

Well, the saying “don’t be the low hanging fruit” applies here. The attackers use scanners which probe the entire Internet over a few days time. There are actual “hacker search engines” like Shodan which do the heavy lifting as well. They look at things that are exposed, and ask those things “what version are you?” – in some capacity, their tools figure out that something is running out on the Internet at a certain version. Next, their tools just say “does this version have a known vulnerability” basically. If the answer is “Yes” then they just add that to their attack list.

Since they generally identify the weak targets ahead of time, they then launch their attacks and breach some systems. Sometimes for their attack to work, the remote environment has to meet some specific requirements like it has to be running a certain version of a certain OS for example. When all the conditions are right, they breach the system.

Once they are in, sometimes they are in a kind of “sandbox” and can’t really go very deep into the system, or get outside of this box they are in. That is when they move on to “lateral movement” or “privilege escalation” attacks.
Now, what I have just described is only one kind of attack methodology. There are so many “vectors” that attackers use.
Let me give you another example.An attacker finds a weakness on a website – perhaps using the method I described above – and then breaches the site

What Can They Do Now?

Well they might place some code on the site which can exploit a vulnerable out of date web browser that loads the site. Consider a user drives by who is using an out of date version of Internet Explorer. The user loads the site – perhaps it is a weather site, or even a Flash based game such as Sudoku (I’m using examples I have seen hit users here) – now that the conditions for the attack are right, and the traffic is present, a attacker will start to get remote shells or be able to attempt to install viruses on computers of users who are visiting this infected website!

If the anti-virus software is out of date, or having some issue, and the user is running unpatched or old versions of software, this can be a wide open door for an attacker.

San Antonio Managed IT Service from Node, LLC provides clients several things in response to these threats. First, our team does patches and installs, manages and confirms the Anti-Virus is working on all the computers we manage. Next, whenever an attack does happen, we defend the environment actively and boot the attacker out. So there is a proactive element, but also a reactive element as well. Both are needed to handle today’s threats.

You know that your computer systems give your entire organization a huge competitive advantage. Imagine if you had no computers to run your business? How would you compete against people who use technology? You also know the big problem with technology – when it breaks down, so does your organization’s ability to operate. We rely on this stuff so much, and it is deep within the fabric of our organizational processes. Without our technology, things just don’t happen. IT consultant San Antonio

It wasn’t always like this. Many folks can remember back to a time before highly computerized society existed. Businesses used paper ledgers and methods to provide process logic to their organizations which would seem completely foreign to most 1st world workers today.

Over the last 3 decades, I have seen computer deployments massively change in scope only a few times. In the 1980’s, I recall setting up monochrome “dumb terminals” for businesses, and wiring them with “serial cable” to a server running Unix – the predecessor to Linux, and this provided organizations access to spreadsheets they could share, and accounting data or other business process control systems.

In the 1990’s, I recall seeing Microsoft Windows come roaring to the scene, bringing with it a graphical user interface that delighted end users with the ability to do new things – such as play solitaire. It also brought e-mail and the Microsoft Office suite. Soon we had AOL, CompuServe, dial-up internet connections and the earliest editions of Internet Explorer. Many of these systems used “terminal emulators” to connect back to their old Unix servers to run legacy systems from the 1980’s. IT maintenance San Antonio

By the year 2000, most small businesses started running their own Microsoft servers – which delivered e-mail to phones via sophisticated mobile synchronization technologies, the web was mature, and applications often ran from the Microsoft Servers, being provided to the organization across high-speed VPN links and such.

It wasn’t long before the smartphone revolution happened with the nationwide roll out of 3G data services and the subsequent release of the Apple iPhone – both events taking place in 2007. service desk San Antonio

So you can see this tectonic shift by 2010. Right around then people started kind of talking about this new technology called “the cloud”.

At the same time, consider that most businesses have, or are running servers on-premise that came from a model from the 1990’s. There are applications running on-site, on big expensive servers – often these very servers sit inside of broom closets. search engine optimization San Antonio

Now imagine the modern needs of the “connected” user who operates with mobile flexibility, and needs to connect to information fast, from anywhere, anytime. They have to connect back to a system often running in a broom closet.

Imagine the users connecting to that application locally. The server’s performance is a huge bottleneck for them. Upgrading it is usually out of the question because that’s only done every 5-6 years, so many times you end up running these mission critical applications on hardware that’s really obsolete really quick. Helpdesk San Antonio

The server crashes. The organization freezes. Communication halts. For some companies, e-mails from customers completely bounce back if the server is down! It is a major event. IT Services are required and must spring into action rapidly.