The Anti-virus Times

Monday, July 23, 2018

Humanity is rushing to embrace the digital economy, which is promising our society complete digitisation and all sorts of benefits. But even the new digital world won't be able to do without a) top managers and b) their subordinates (here we are going to talk about system administrators). And yet, no matter how obvious and trite the point may seem, malware will persist, too, and so will infection incidents and (unsurprisingly) anti-viruses. How are all these attributes of the upcoming digital era related to each other? Well, the relationship is complex and somewhat dangerous!

Mistakes made by companies when establishing an information security system can result in:

• Money and data being stolen by robots and the company’s own devices, or their employee’s personal devices that are also used for work;
• Malware outbreaks in multiple corporate infrastructures;
• The corporate infrastructure being used for illegal activities, including terrorism;
• Attacks on critical infrastructure elements;
• Unreliable authentication routines being exploited by scammers to compromise business communications.

This is not a complete list, and items will surely be added to it in the future. Why are we bringing all this up?

The WannaCry and NotPetya outbreaks are already stale, but we can't find better examples to illustrate our point.

System administrators understand that centralised control over anti-virus software can prevent users from changing its settings.

That's NotPetya. The one that managed to spread across so many corporate networks because system administrators disabled anti-virus software on the computers with their own hands to make sure that it wouldn't interfere with MeDoc's operation—a recommendation received from the very developers of the ill-fated application. We are confident that in many cases the administrators didn't notify their superiors that they were going to pull the plug on the anti-virus. And undoubtedly, many top managers never learnt why their businesses suffered from some Petya. The secret was never revealed.