Good News if you are using Sophos Endpoint Protection and/or Intercept X Security Products

Sophos Stops Petya Ransomware

As with the recent WannaCry Ransomware attack, organizations around the world have again been affected by a new ransomware variant known as the Petya cyber-attack. We wanted to contact you to offer our advice and support.
Customers using Sophos Endpoint Protection are protected against all known variants of this ransomware. We first issued protection on June 27th at 13:50 UTC and have provided several updates since then to provide further protection against possible future variants.
In addition, customers using Sophos Intercept X were proactively protected with no data encrypted from the moment this new ransomware variant appeared.
Find out more about Intercept X and how it can protect your customers from ransomware like Petya and Wanna:

Further Information

Sophos KB: New variant of Petya ransomware
NakedSecurity:  Deconstructing Petya: how it spreads and how to fight back

Breaking news: here’s what we know about what could be the latest ‘Petya’ ransomware outbreak

Naked Security just posted a breaking news item on their site that they will be updating as they hear back from Sophos Labs.

A significant ransomware attack is spreading across Europe, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Sophos is investigating the attack and will continue to provide updates here throughout the day.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/06/27/breaking-news-what-we-know-about-the-global-ransomware-outbreak/

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Sophos Conference Part 4 (Sophos Central Wireless)

Sophos Central Wireless is still not ready for primetime. It is still not on par with any of the other top wireless competitors. So if you wish to use Sophos Access Points in conjunction with the Sophos Firewall products do that. They are best used in smaller configurations. These are great products for small offices that only need 1-5 AP’s. While they do support larger configurations they don’t have a real strong wireless connection or able to handle extremely dense configurations. They are reasonable and there is some exciting new functions coming down the path.

One of these is an upgrade to the firmware that will allow the access points to be used as such but they will also be able to work as firewall/routers as well. If you need more power just add more access points. This will probably require better wireless access point technology as well but it is something that we can look forward to.

Sophos Conference Part 3 (Sophos Central Intercept X)

Artificial Intelligence has been coming along and with Sophos’s recent purchase of Invincea, they are currently working on integrating the machine learning engine into Intercept X. This will provide a greater degree of protection that is continuously learning from the malware that is ceaselessly being produced. There may be an increase in price for those of you that haven’t invested in Intercept X yet but those of you that have will get the upgrade at no cost.

Further development of Intercept X will see more of the features of Sophos Central Endpoint being incorporated in Intercept X. Looking at this in the long term I think that this is the right direction. Having the ability to break out the Intercept X functions though to allow it on sit on top of other anti-virus packages makes it a nice way for us to increase protection on non-Sophos protected systems until we can exchange their current endpoint protection software with a Sophos exclusive product.

Sophos Conference Part 2 (Sophos Central Mobile)

Sophos Central Mobile has finally reached parity with the on-premise version. What great news especially since we don’t have to worry about setting up the server. Sophos Central provides hosted services that are constantly being monitored and updated. As new features are developed they are added to the system at no charge and without any sweat off our brow.

Below is a list of the comparative features:

Feature matrix: http://www.bobstechtalk.com/storage/article-add-on-files/sophos-mobile-7-feature-matrix.pdf

Sophos Partner Conference–Las Vegas

I am excited about being here for the Conference. II is always great seeing the PAC group and discussing our experiences both with Sophos as well as with other aspects of our businesses. As the week progresses I will be posting some of the the things that are coming up and that Sophos wants us to be excited about. Probably nothing new to me since we are discussing these things in our meetings but for all of you it could be very compelling to look at some new products to increase your security levels.

Here is an email we sent out today. Let me know if you are interested to be on our mailing list.

Google boosts verification after wave of Maps fake listings fraud

Apparently Google has been having some issues with illegitimate companies populating their maps, some even with ratings. They are getting there through the free to list Google My Business program.

In the Naked  Security Article, John E. Dunn goes into depth about how Google is admitting that it has been working on this problem for awhile.

This is not just a problem with Google’s search engine but other like Bing. So be aware that this is going on and gird yourself against these fraudsters!

Read the entire article here.

Sophos Conference Part 1 (Firewall Technology)

There are quite a few exciting items coming up in the next few months. When Version 17 of the XG firewall software is released we will be gaining closer parity with the current SG v9.x software products. The one disappointing piece of news was that we won’t be seeing a migration program to convert SG to XG. However, we may get a package to do part of the migration of just the objects, but not the policies. This would be a start but it wasn’t the full migration package we had hoped for.

Sophos iView Overview

Sophos iView from Sophos on Vimeo.

Analysis: The Shame of Ransomware

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