Halting the spread of Malware
Malware is right at the forefront of people minds (for a while at least) due to the attack of the Wannacry Virus ( May 2017). Now the internet has plenty of reminder articles with the usual content to run a firewall, Patch your operating system and run a Anti Virus programme.In this post, I would like to highlight some simple things that could help if you ever git hit by malware.
Malware is right at the forefront of people minds (for a while at least) due to the attack of the Wannacry Virus ( May 2017).
Now the internet has plenty of reminder articles with the usual content to run a firewall, Patch your operating system and run a Anti Virus programme.
In this post, I would like to highlight some simple things that could help if you ever get hit by malware.
These steps by themselves will not stop you getting malware, but it should reduce the impact.
Think of it like washing your hands before you eat your food. Or washing your hands after going to the lavatory. You are doing these things… Right?
It takes a bit of time, but it could stop you and others getting some nasty illness.
5 Simple every day steps to halt the spread of Malware on your computers.
- Do not use your computer with full admin rights. Remove your admin rights from your user account, and use a dedicated admin account when required.
- Only give your user account access to the network shares you need. Try and restrict access to just the files you need to do your tasks. You might need to do some data classification and create some security groups to put this in place.
- Unplug External Hard Drives as soon as you have finished using them.
- Now this one is a little technnical, you may need your IT Gal/Guy to help you. Use guest isolation on your Wifi network. On your Newtork switches, use Primary and Isolated private VLAN’s. Put your servers in the Primary and your desktops in the isoloated VLAN.
- Where possible run a mixture of Computer Operating systems. Windows Desktops and Ubuntu Linux make a good combination. It’s rare that malware attacks both at once. Plus you need to keep them both patched and updated. It’s not difficult to manage a mixed envrionment, thats what DEVOPS is for
Some of these steps will require you to give up some convenience (It’s still amazes me to see signs in buildings where adults work aksing them to wash your hands after leaving the lavatory).
However these steps will greatly reduce the opporunity for Malware to run across your computer systems.