Hackers Targeting Your Office Gossip?
Those Instant Message Services Aren’t so Private
Traditionally, when you think of a hacker being able to obtain your information, you might think that you somehow ended up innocently installing some form of malware which in turn opened up your work or home network to hackers.
Which is pretty true, and one type of service we rarely think about are those instant messaging services used by many within the corporate world these days.
The amount of information your employees share on those unmanaged services is actually a lot more critical to an organization’s inner workings that one might really think.
What that opens any organization up to is a ransomware attack.
Using intel gleaned from an instant messaging service, hackers can obtain some pretty important details about an organization’s inner workings, it’s projects, it’s client base, how much money is involved with particular contracts and deals and they can even obtain details with regards to both current past employees.
Many of these instant messaging programs used are more often than not are not entirely secure and not that, they are not managed by a member of management much less a member of IT if an organization has an IT department.
Truthfully and also sadly, employee’s who partake in the fine art of office gossip using these types of services do not think about the vast amount of information they are gossiping about or sharing with one another much less, that the information could potentially be used in some future ransomware attack on the organization, it’s employee, bank, customer, etc.
Hackers are no longer using stolen intel to just simply steal things like bank account information, they are using information in order to take an organization’s entire network for hostage.
Ransomware attacks saw a surge of 2,500% in just 2017 alone.
Slacks one of the most popular messaging services used in offices these days admitted back in March that they found and patched a vulnerability that would have given hackers full access to chat histories, shared files among other critical data. Chat logs from your workforce can be a valuable and rich source of intel to any hacker worth his weight in gold.
That is a pretty big deal, one which will continue to be a growing concern because hackers do not suddenly get stupid, fix one vulnerability and another will be found, usually by hackers first.
So how does an organization get around this type of situation?
Easy get rid of things like instant messaging programs in your office and force your employees to keeping that office gossip, at the water cooler.
Cristal M Clark
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