You should immediately advise your staff to not open ANY files that are sent to you through e-mail. This new virus/trojan arrives as an e-mail that contains a zip, doc, xls, or pdf file that pretends to be an invoice, purchase order, bill, complaint, UPS or USPS shipment or other business communication. If you receive such a message, you should verify with the sender that they did in fact send this message prior to opening the attachment.
This threat is specifically designed to defeat firewalls, anti-virus and anti-malware software. There is presently no known way to block these threats. If you open such an attachment, you won't even know you have been infected until you attempt to access data on your network. Once infected, your critical data is inaccessible and current recovery steps are time consuming and expensive. We cannot stress the severity of this threat enough.
We are actively monitoring this situation and working with our security partners to implement updates as soon as they are available. In the meantime, we recommend that you and your team adopt a very conservative posture toward this threat by not opening any e-mail attachments you have not personally verified. We expect this threat to remain active for the foreseeable future.
If you have any questions or concerns related to this, please do not hesitate to contact our office.
IES, Inc.
781-816-9437
www.iesAdvisors.com
