Here is a news column featuring Alvaka/Noloki EVP and security expert, Kevin McDonald.
It’s a business owner’s worst nightmare.
You arrive for work, sit down at your computer and find that you can’t access any of your files because cyber criminals have encrypted them, locking them from being accessed by anyone but the hackers themselves. It’s a grim scenario, and it’s happening with increasing frequency as hackers seek to extort money from businesses.
Kevin McDonald has seen plenty of these attacks as president of Noloki, an Irvine-based information security firm. McDonald addressed the rise of cyberterrorism at an economic forum held Tuesday at Caltech’s Athenaeum Club. Sponsored by Technolink Association, the event featured experts on the global economy, the energy industry, intellectual property rights and more.
“Ransomware is basically a piece of malware that infects your computer, whether it’s locally or a network,” McDonald said. “That infection then goes to the command control center and pulls down an encryption tool that encrypts the local computer.”
And attacks like these can become even worse — if that local computer has rights to access other systems, it can encrypt them as well….
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.