Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Friday, May 14th, 2021I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 20th episode of our show,Listen to us Wednesday and Friday mornings, or on our saturday afternoon bonus shows. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.If you have a problem in your business you want solved, email us at Solutions@youroperationssolved.com, we may just feature your business on our bonus show as we tackle it to help others.With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headlinesFirst, a mini story. I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the colonial pipeline ransomware attack. We are, after all, a tech news show, and this ransomware attack is front page news nationally. The fact of the matter is though, beyond the obvious knock on effect of increased fuel costs, this doesn't have direct impact on small businesses, despite the flurry of followup marketing activity by cybersecurity vendors and firms. As this is a show looking to help small businesses out, covering this story in depth would be nothing but fluff. Use this as a reminder to do a test restore on your backups, if you haven't done so recently. Anyone trying to tell you that the colonial pipeline attack changes ANYTHING for a business that doesn't have thousands of employees, is trying to sell you something, and isn't able to let the quality of their product stand by itself.Next, our main story, also a security issue, is a major bug in the modern implementation of wifi security, leaving virtually all wifi devices vulnerable.When I was looking for the main story for todays episode, I happened upon an article on a hypothetical security vulnerability with wifi. I opened it thinking that it likely wouldn't be a good fit for the show, but that I wanted to read it to keep myself informed. As I read more, however, I realized how truly unprecedented this flaw, or set of flaws was, and decided to cover it.back almost nine months ago, researchers discovered an exploit in the security protocols that underpin modern wifi that could leave virtually every wifi network on the planet open to very serious attacks, They dubbed this set of exploits FragAttacks. As is best practice when researchers discover a flaw like this, the flaw was not disclosed publicly immediately. Instead, the researchers contacted vendors to try to get the issues fixed before they became public knowledge. This is known as "responsible disclosure." After the vendors are given an opportunity to fix the bugs, the public is then given the knowledge publically. The idea here is that this minimizes the time between when a potentially dangerous issue is widely known where anyone can develop malware for it, and patches being available that protect users of the compromised product. The disclosure period, which for this flaw was 9 months, is over. Microsoft has released a patch that should ensure that windows computers connected to affected networks are not vulnerable provided they are on the latest version of windows 10.So, this bug specifically would allow someone within wifi range to-connect to a network and use it without a password-eavesdrop on the traffic between a user who was connected to the wifi, and the internet-modify or fake that traffic while pretending to be the wifi access point, for instance by loading a fake version of Amazon.com to users who tried to do online shopping, one that steals your credit card info.and much much more. This is a scary flaw.So, what do you need to do to keep yourself, your business, and your customers safe?Well for one, recognize this is a flaw that affects WIFI, and only wifi. So, any devices or computers that are connected to the internet via a network cable are unaffected. Similarly, any networks running on hardware from before the standard with these flaws was created, so older than 1997, is unaffected, though, if you're running 1997 era networking gear, you likely have bigger security problems.Two, patch your systems. Microsoft has released a patch for windows computers to be able to use affected networks safely, so, if you're on windows 10, update with the patches released on tuesday the 11th, and that PC will be safe. If you're still on windows 8.1, 8, 7, or earlier, there is no patch coming, and these systems will forever be vulnerable to these issues.Three, recognize that this flaw affects wifi hardware. So your wifi access points are vulnerable. If you are on enterprise grade or prosumer grade gear; Fortinet, ubiquiti, cisco, sonicwall, meraki, watchguard, HP enterprise, palo alto, whatever, there's likely a patch either applied or incoming, research your specific product and install it ASAP. If you are using prosumer networking hardware, its highly, highly likely that nothing will be done, and that you'll need to replace the hardware with something that's not fragattack ...
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18 mins