NetWorthy Systems Blog

Nothing is more frustrating than going to log into your device and finding out that you either cannot access it or that files you thought were there have been wiped. Unfortunately, this is the situation that many users of a specific device have recently gone through. Thanks to an unpatched vulnerability, users of Western Digital’s My Book network-attached storage device are suffering from lost files and lost account access stemming from remote access.

You might hear the term “zero-day” when discussing security threats, but do you know what they actually are? A zero-day threat is arguably one of the most devastating and dangerous security issues your business could face, and if you’re not prepared, they could be the end of it.

Zero-day threats are some of the most dangerous ones out there. What we mean by “zero day” threats are those that have been discovered by hackers before an official patch has been released by the developers, giving them exactly zero days before they are actively exploited in the wild. One of the more dangerous zero-day threats out there at the moment is one that takes advantage of Internet Explorer.

Intel recently found itself (once again) in hot water, mere months after many flaws were discovered in the firmware that enables all of their chips to do their job. This time, the issue could have potentially caused a permanent dip in the CPU’s capacity to function properly. This has come to be known as the Meltdown vulnerability.

August saw yet another Patch Tuesday designed to resolve security issues in Microsoft products. Out of the 48 vulnerabilities resolved, 15 affected Windows, while 25 were rated as critical, 21 as important, and 27 that allowed for remote code execution. This might sound a little overwhelming, so we’ll try to simplify it a bit--a lot of flaws were fixed, and the majority of them can be considered dangerous for your organization.