Happy Monday and happy holidays! I’ve got some interesting news to start off this holiday week. First, Microsoft will no longer support Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2 after January 14th, 2020. These systems have reached their end-of-life mark and this means that Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or support for PCs with Windows 7 and organizations using Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2. Continuing to use these systems after support has ended, means more system vulnerabilities and higher security risk for you and your organizations.
In other news, ransomware attacks are continuing to rise, as New Orleans declared a state of emergency just days ago as a result of one. The city of New Orleans’ IT department powered down all of the servers and turned off all employee computers, while also disconnecting them from the internet. The city was readily prepared for a ransomware attack, unlike many other cities who have recently been affected, and all of the significant data was backed up. The cost to rebuild the city’s network is around $1 million, but the New Orleans CIO said the ransomware never progressed far enough to demand a ransom, fortunately.
Finally, the popular grocery store, Wawa, has recently announced a data breach that potentially affected all of their locations between March 4th and December 12th in 2019. On December 10th, their information security team found malware on Wawa payment processing servers. “Payment card information, including credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names were compromised and affected by the malware.” Wawa is providing potentially impacted customers with a year of free identity theft protection and credit monitoring.
That’s all for today! Thank you for tuning in to this week’s segment of “Mondays With Miranda!” Keep up to date with current news by following NeQter Labs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We love comments and questions, so drop me an email [email protected]. Happy holidays!