In the past, the Board has always been expected to make strategic decisions, choosing what was best for the overall success of their institution.  For most institutions, these decisions were made with little information or regard to cybersecurity.   As threats to our information security evolve, so do examiner expectations for the Board of Directors. 

CoNetrix is pleased to announce two candidates for consideration in the BankNews 2017 Innovative Solutions Awards. The 2017 Innovative Solutions Awards, sponsored by BankNews, recognize companies that have introduced or significantly enhanced products designed to help community banks become more efficient, expand their capabilities and, ultimately, better serve their customers. The Innovative Solutions Awards are presented in five categories:

As we’ve been working through migrating email delivery from Barracuda ESS to Proofpoint, one of the issues that pop up would be in regards to SPF records. I figured I’d give a quick overview about how SPF records work and why this could be an important issue.  

I came across an issue where two ESX servers that had been running for approximately 8-9 months without a reboot suddenly showed offline status in VCenter.  Looking at the events in vCenter, it showed that the ramdisk 'TMP' was full  and could not write to file /tmp/.SapInfoSysSwap.lock.LOCK.#####.  

I recently built new Exchange 2016 servers for a customer and needed to move all of the users’ mailboxes to the new servers. When I initially issued the moved requests, the migrations were running about 10Mbps and only moving about 5 mailboxes at a time. There were about 700 users and 1.5TB of email, so obviously this was going to take a very long time I began researching how to increase the speed of mailbox migrations and found several settings that could be changed. Disabling content indexing allowed the migration to occur between 150Mbps and 200Mbps.

I was updating ESX with a customer a few weeks ago and ran into issues. We successfully upgraded from ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 Update3 using the custom Dell ISO. We then attempted to update to the latest version of ESXi 5.5, but the host purple screened upon reboot. We decided to call VMware support to create a trouble ticket. The VMware engineer provided a simple solution for our issue, which was to press Shift+r when the Hypervisor progress bar starts loading. This takes you to a menu where you can select the previous build. The VMware article can be found here: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1033604. We followed these instructions and were able to successfully boot the ESX host again.

  A specific type of malware named WannaCry made international headlines in May after achieving an unprecedented infection rate. Using EternalBlue, a recently leaked tool from the US Intelligence community, it installed malicious software that encrypted files then required victims to pay a ransom to restore them. The timing of this tool’s release and subsequent use in such a widespread event has taught – and retaught - network administrators around the globe to revisit the basic lessons of security.

When you consider your bank’s security awareness training, what comes to mind? Maybe you think of an hour-long lecture you present (or attend) on an annual basis. Maybe you think of an online program you watched or a lengthy document you read. Whatever may come to mind, it is important to ask the question: How effective is this training?

An outbreak of the WCry (also known as WannaCry/WanaCrypt0r) ransomware began to be reported May 12, 2017. The attack was worldwide and deemed by some as “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” The goal of the attack, like all ransomware, is to encrypt computer files making them unavailable to the computer user. A payment is required to get the key which unlocks the files.

HP has a handy new “feature” on some of their newer model home and office printers that allows you to print wirelessly when a wireless network is not available. The printer does this by broadcasting its own SSID with a name something like “DIRECT-B7-HP ENVY 4520 Series”. This seems like a harmless (and pointless) feature, but it can wreak havoc on your wireless network.