Month: April 2020

Join Fortinet Online for the Digital Edition of Accelerate 2020

Fortinet is excited to offer customers and partners the opportunity to participate in a Digital Edition of Accelerate 2020. For convenience purposes, Fortinet will hold three online events to cater to participants from across the globe. This virtual conference will take place on the following dates:

May 12: Americas @ 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time
May 13: APAC @ 11:00 AM Australian EST / 9:00 AM Singapore SGT
May 14: EMEA @ 10:00 AM Central European Time

By participating in this free online experience, attendees can enjoy the main components of the annual Accelerate conference from the comfort and safety of their own space. Through engaging keynotes, enlightening training sessions, and virtual interaction opportunities, customers and partners will gain the knowledge required to secure their networks and ensure business continuity.

Insight from Industry Experts

During each event, attendees can hear from Fortinet and industry leaders who will provide insights on modern cybersecurity challenges and the solutions required to protect networks. The following keynote sessions will help attendees broaden their perspectives and enhance their knowledge of network security and technology.

On the Edge of Something Big: Security’s Next Frontier

Amid the convergence of IT and Operational Technology (OT) networks, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and the arrival of 5G, organizations are experiencing a new era of hyper-connectivity between devices, applications, and systems. As a result, neither first nor second-generation security are able to protect today’s new distributed networks. During his keynote, Ken Xie, Fortinet Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO, will explain why organizations should move to a third-generation of security if they are to protect multiple edges across users, devices, networks, data, and applications.

A Platform Approach to Cybersecurity is Essential

When too many security point products are involved, organizations can find it difficult – or even impossible – to defend against today’s sophisticated cyber threats. During this session, Patrice Perche, Fortinet’s Senior Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Support, will share his expertise on the Fortinet Security Fabric and how it helps customers realize their digital transformation goals. Perche will also discuss Fortinet’s investment in its global partner ecosystem and what this means for business growth and continuity.

Fortinet Security Fabric Enables Digital Innovation

The benefits realized by embracing digital transformation are immense. Nevertheless, organizations must take appropriate steps to secure their digital innovation efforts before the risks become too great to manage. This session will be hosted by John Maddison, Fortinet’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Executive Vice President of Products, who will highlight key industry trends and run through the latest features of Fortinet’s Security Fabric platform. He will also talk about how a cybersecurity platform is the only way to manage cyber risk.

Formula E – A Revolution in Motorsport

Led by Roger Griffiths, Principal and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BMW i Andretti Motorsport, this session will dive into the world of Formula E racing. Since its inaugural race in 2014, Formula E has thrived on the combination of electric street racing, technology, entertainment, and sustainability. During this keynote, attendees will hear firsthand accounts of how this championship has found success through the collaboration of teamwork, engineering, and digital innovation.

Areas of Focus

In addition to hearing from these keynote speakers, attendees will also gain in-depth knowledge of Fortinet technologies, partner opportunities, and vertical-focused security strategies through the following sessions.

How Fortinet Secures Digital Innovation

These sessions will explain how Fortinet helps protect organizations and their digital transformation initiatives while also providing guidance on when and how to use a variety of industry-leading products. Sessions will be broken out into five categories:

Opportunities for Partners

These partner-only sessions will cover a range of topics focused on enabling business growth and continuity, including the new Fortinet Engage Partner Program. To ensure attendees receive the most relevant information, there will be four sets of sessions that will be specific to LATAM partners, EMEA partners, APAC partners, North American partners, and Service Providers.

Addressing Vertical-Specific Challenges

These sessions will center on the challenges being faced across industries as organizations shift their business models as a result of current events. Attendees will hear from experts across a range of sectors, including education, energy, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.

Final Thoughts

Although this year’s conference will be different from those in the past, the digital edition of Accelerate 2020 is designed to deliver the same level of expertise and essential information our customers and partners have grown to expect from past events. By participating in this virtual event, attendees will gain the knowledge required to grow and secure their businesses, even in times of uncertainty.

What: Accelerate 2020
Where: Online Event – free of charge
When: May 12 (Americas), May 13 (APAC), May 14 (EMEA)

Learn more about the Accelerate 2020 online events and register today. Follow us and engage on social media using #Accelerate20.

Engage in our Fortinet user community (Fuse). Share ideas and feedback, learn more about Accelerate, or connect with peers.

As Fortinet partners, Net Universe offers all Fortinet devices and subscriptions with worldwide Delivery Services.
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Remote sales: Building a mass customer communication strategy in times of change

From a business point of view, the coronavirus pandemic has made it more important than ever to stay connected with customers. It’s crucial to have clear communication strategies in place to answer the questions our customers are bound to have when faced with such a large-scale change. While the coronavirus is obviously an extreme example, this change could also be something far simpler, like a new industry-wide policy announcement. During such times, customer relationships are all about maintaining your customers’ trust in your business.

Mass emails are the go-to medium for communicating critical information during such times. Don’t let the word “mass” confuse you, though. Even a mass communication strategy requires a scalpel approach, and you should keep the following points in mind when creating a plan tailored for your customers’ needs.

Be clear in your message content

Naturally, customers would like some reassurance that you have everyone’s best interests at heart. However, vague platitudes can only get you so far. Include concrete answers on how your business has or will be affected. Are your offices functioning on a reduced capacity? Will your shipments be delayed? Has manufacturing been paused? Even if your news isn’t positive, being upfront about it will earn your customers’ appreciation. If you have new business processes in place, explain them clearly. For example, if you run a food delivery service, continually emphasize that you now offer zero contact delivery—provide a step-by-step breakdown of what it is and how it works. Finally, make it easy for recipients to engage with or respond to your emails. Highlight any dedicated hotline numbers, lead them to a dedicated landing page with relevant business updates, or provide links for them to track their orders. Simplicity and clarity are key in times of confusion.

Put in some thought about your target audience

Mass messages don’t necessarily have to go out to your entire audience base. Your content can vary with different customer segments. You should tailor your messages based on geography, lead type, product interest, or any other relevant differentiating factors. You can even go deeper, and segment them based on their volume of business, how engaged they are with your brand, and so on. Choosing the right niche within a wide lead or customer base helps make your content appear more personal, and therefore relevant, to each recipient.

Decide who your messenger is, and who receives customer responses

Messages are best received when they come from a trusted source. Obviously, a note from the CEO will have a higher open rate than one from a generic support ID. A message from the sales rep a lead or customer has had contact with in the past will appear more personal. Select your messenger with care to increase the chances of your message being distributed effectively. Conversely, you should also be deliberate in choosing who will receive your customers’ responses. If you expect your customers to respond with standard questions, you can redirect these to your support team. If you are expecting high level, non-standard responses, you can opt to send them directly to a concerned manager.

Schedule messages and follow-ups at appropriate times

Aiming for high open rates, impressions, or engagement is a standard priority with any message you send out. In times of change, however, it becomes even more critical that your message is seen by a majority of your customer base. While you may have an idea of the best time to send out an email, these times may vary if your customers are going through a period of change as well. You should take the opportunity to monitor open rates more closely. It’s okay to send out messages a bit more frequently, since message distribution is a higher priority. Finally, if you have several distinct updates to share, you can send out multiple follow-ups. You can plan a series of three to four short emails and send them out in a clear flow based on those who have received or opened the previous messages.

Automate response steps and track message performance

Sending out a high volume of emails might result in a high volume increase of redundant manual tasks like data entry, call scheduling, and so forth. Where possible, you should automate these response actions. For instance, if you send out a mail asking your customers if they would like to speak to a company rep, you can schedule calls with those who respond. You can also schedule calls with customers in case of an email bounce. Or, you could create follow-up tasks to check personally on their order status if they engage with mails talking about shipment changes. Doing all of this automatically reduces a substantial amount of overhead and streamlines business operations. Finally, you should regularly track the statistics for all of these emails and refine your messaging or targeting if needed.

To reach out to your customer base, you may also choose to disseminate critical information via SMS, social media, advertisements, and other mass communication channels suitable to your business. While the majority of this article applies to email communication, it can be relevant to other channels as well. Zoho CRM comes with features to manage and track both mass emails and social media communications. CRM also includes a host of useful integrations for SMS communications. You can use all of these features to implement your mass communication strategy remotely and analyze its performance.

Mass customer communication is just one element of your sales framework. The upcoming posts in this series will highlight various other such elements. With Zoho CRM, you can build and implement your sales strategy all from the comfort of your home. Visit our website to gain a holistic look into how Zoho CRM is the perfect remote sales software.

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The sudden rise of virtual classroom software « Zoho Blog

These are unprecedented times which have dramatically changed our daily lives. Schools and colleges are suspended, and students and trainees are losing precious time in classes. This is impacting their academic and skills development progress.

While we know the situation in the world can feel unsettling, virtual classroom software is here to help. The most asked question about online training sessions is about interaction with students since the teacher is not physically in front of the class. Most people think that engagement and satisfaction go down significantly when the face to face element is lost. We however, emphatically disagree.

Read on to see how Zoho ShowTime can offer a comprehensive training platform for your employee training and student education exercises—just like you’d do in a brick-and-mortar classroom.

Virtual classrooms offer incomparable convenience and flexibility!

Virtual classrooms can be attended from anywhere—a bedroom, garage, backyard, or any other place deemed fit—all anyone needs is a laptop or smartphone with an internet connection. Even better? There’s no traveling involved—the class comes to the trainee. Brilliant!

Given the current crisis, it’s adviced to self-isolate and work from home. With virtual classrooms, you get the benefit of safety and defense from the virus, while still getting access to outstanding learning experiences on your schedules. There is no physical classroom that can match that.

Student-trainer interaction takes the spotlight.

Let’s address the elephant in the room—real-time classroom interaction. In a traditional brick-and-mortar classroom, opinions are shared, questions asked and answered, examples described, and naturally high levels of engagement and interaction among students, peers and trainers. But this engagement isn’t a result of physical proximity.

Showtime is the perfect tool for delivering classroom style, face-to-face sessions, full of features to that ensure every virtual session is engaging and interactive—just like the real deal. The trainer can keep the students engaged mid-sessions with polls. Rich chat features allow for real-time communication between peers and trainers, while screen-shares, shared learning materials, handouts, and whiteboards make the online classroom a complete substitute for the traditional experience. You can also use Zoho ShowTime’s co-trainer option to introduce l subject matter experts from around the world to your students.

Trainers can also assess the trainees’ participation in the session, share great questions with the class, and record the session as it unfolds. The recording can later be sent to the participants who missed the session or want to review it, making sure that everyone can get the information, at their own pace, as many times as they’d like.

Every student is unique—curating on-demand content for self-paced study.

Want to train employees abroad? Finding it a challenge to keep up with time zones? Does your institute provide self-study material or offer certification courses? If the answer to any of those questions is a “yes”, then Zoho ShowTime is the solution for you.

You can upload course videos for employees and trainees to watch at their convenience. As a trainer, you can also share hand-outs as reference material. And you can follow up with tests and quizzes to make sure the information is hitting home.

Virtual or physical, learning is always taking place.

In conclusion, virtual classrooms leverage the best of remote teaching technologies to make learning an easier and more convenient experience. They also help significantly lower training costs while providing vastly superior reach for students and teachers both.

Zoho ShowTime is a single comprehensive tool for all your remote teaching needs. If you’d like to experience ShowTime for yourself, please sign up here. Follow ShowTime’s Twitter handle to stay updated about the product, as well as receive tips and tricks on how to become a successful trainer.

Microsoft delivers fixes for 110 bugs in April, 2020 Patch Tuesday – Sophos News

For the April edition of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft repaired a total of 110 security vulnerabilities across their product line. Included in this count are 37 remote code execution bugs, and 33 elevation of privilege bugs. The company rated eighteen of the vulnerabilities “Critical.”

This release’s most notable item is the follow-up to last month’s announcement, “Cybercriminals are exploiting two unpatched zero-day flaws affecting all supported versions of Windows“. At the time, the company advised a workaround for mitigating the risk. Today, the fix for the two vulnerabilities went live.

Here are the patch highlights:

Adobe Font Manager Library Remote Code Execution

CVE-2020-0938, CVE-2020-1020

Two font vulnerabilities are present in the handling of the old and obsolete Type 1 (PostScript) font standard that makes use of file extensions .PFB and .PFM.

If an attacker is able to manipulate an unpatched Windows system into handling and displaying a malicious Type 1 font file (crafted by the attacker), the bugs could be exploited to compromise the system.

On Windows versions prior to Windows 10, the code responsible for handling fonts is running in high-privileged kernel mode. This makes the impact much more severe on older editions, such as (the now unsupported) Windows 7, or Windows 8.1 – the bugs can be used to perform an elevation of privilege attack, in addition to remote code execution.

Thankfully, on Windows 10 systems the same code has been moved to be running in a low-privileged, sandboxed user mode process. This hardening measure limits the bugs’ usefulness for elevation of privilege attacks. However, they still expose the system to a remote code execution scenario.

Normally, an attacker can take advantage of a font vulnerability to achieve remote code execution by enticing a victim to open a web page or document that has the malicious font embedded in them.

In the case of web pages, the “CSS Web fonts” feature can be used for embedding. Office documents and PDF documents also have support for embedding fonts in them.

Fortunately, due to the Type 1 font standard falling from favor, and being replaced by the newer TrueType and OpenType standards, many software do not support the embedding of Type 1 fonts. This is true for example in web browsers and Office software, so it can be said that the remote code execution attack scope for Type 1 bugs is somewhat limited in comparison to bugs affecting TrueType fonts.

Windows Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities

Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities could permit an attacker with limited access to a Windows system to gain more control over it, typically allowing for “escaping” a low integrity or sandboxed process by exploiting such a vulnerability, and subsequently gaining unlimited permissions to the system.

This month’s EoP bugs affect an assortment of Windows components, among them: Win32k (Graphics), Push Notification Service, DirectX, and amusingly enough, two of the bugs were discovered in Windows Defender – the built-in anti-malware component of Windows.

SharePoint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

CVE-2020-0920, CVE-2020-0929, CVE-2020-0931, CVE-2020-0932, CVE-2020-0971, CVE-2020-0974

Out of a total of 20(!) different bugs affecting SharePoint, 6 are classified Remote Code Execution.

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform. It is almost always used by organizations, not individuals. There wasn’t any detailed technical information about any of the bugs that were found, so it’s unclear whether these bugs affect users of SharePoint Server or SharePoint Online (or both).

However from the sheer amount of fixes being deployed for this product, it’s safe to assume the bugs as a whole constitute a high risk of compromise, and therefore this month’s patch is definitely not something to disregard if you use SharePoint.

Sophos detection guidance

Sophos has released following detection to address the following vulnerabilities. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of protection measures Sophos has implemented, and that additional vulnerabilities and corresponding detection may be released in the future.

Net Universe offers all Sophos Devices and subscritpions also consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
Send us an email to [email protected] for more information or visit https://www.netuniversecorp.com/sophos.

Facing down the myriad threats tied to COVID-19 – Sophos News

Unscrupulous marketers and cyber-criminals have seized upon concerns over the emergence of the COVID-19 global pandemic as bait for spam, phishing attacks and malware. In recent weeks, the use of “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” in domain names, potentially unwanted email messages, and phishing and malware delivery schemes has skyrocketed. As of April 14, Sophos has identified over 1,700 malicious domains using “corona” or “covid” in their names, of which 1,200 are currently active.

We’re continuing to work to identify, detect and block these threats. We’re also engaging with the security community to help defend more broadly against the surge in COVID-19 related threats. Joshua Saxe, Sophos’ chief scientist, has launched a Slack channel for open collaboration on taking on pandemic-themed threats. [Update, April 20: The Slack channel now has over 3,400 members from security firms, as well as private and government organizations.]

We’re also publishing indicators of compromise we discover for related threats in a public GitHub. In this report, we’ll examine some of the trends we’re seeing in pandemic-themed spam and scams. The data we present here is just a portion of what we’ve seen so far, and we continue to assess intelligence data as it becomes available.

The surge of spam

The spam we found to be carrying an installer for Trickbot malware earlier this month was just one example of how spammers and criminals are using hunger for information about the pandemic to lure in their targets.

While COVID-19 emerged as a crisis in China in December, references to the virus in spam and phishing emails only really began to emerge in January—and like the virus itself, they grew exponentially. By early March, COVID-19 and Coronavirus already represented a significant percentage of the spam traffic we measured.

Spam campaigns detected by Sophos included:

A sextortion scheme threatening to infect the target’s family with COVID-19 if they didn’t pay.
A scam purporting to be a fundraising plea from the World Health Organization, asking for donations in Bitcoin to fund COVID-19 research.
Messages purportedly from WHO, but carrying documents with dropper malware.
Marketing for “emergency supplies,” including filter masks.
A sales pitch for a $37 video download, purporting to offer insider information from a “military source” on how to survive Coronavirus
[Update, March 27) We’re continuing to see new COVID-19 related extortion scams. Here’s another we’ve detected and blocked:

Building spamming and phishing infrastructure

COVID-19 has left a huge mark on the Internet’s namespace over the past two months. Certificate transparency log data from the major certificate authorities has shown a significant rise in the number of SSL certificates registered for sites using “corona” or “covid” in their names.

To get a sense of how big that change has been, we looked at log data over the past six months for new certificates issued for hostnames with “corona” or “covid-19” in them. To establish a baseline from before the outbreak became global news, we looked at the same period a year ago (September 2018 to March 2019) for comparison.

Before January, most certificates that contained “corona” referred to a locality, service or legitimate brand name. These accounted for an average of 288 certificates activated per month. References to “covid” did not exist in any certificate registrations we could find record of prior to 2020, and the only domain that really stands out belongs to Arizona-based A/V accessory manufacturer COVID, which owns the .com domain.

A typical site registering a certificate with “corona” in its URL in 2018.

The pandemic changed the equation. Starting in January of 2020, there was an exponential rise in new certificates carrying these terms, nearly doubling from the norm to 558 for that month, and then nearly doubling again in February to 868. In the first two-thirds of March, over 6,086 new certificates bearing host names with “covid” and “corona” were issued—nearly a 20-time increase over the year before.

Over 65% of these new domains were programmatically registered for free through Let’s Encrypt, and another 5% used Cloudflare as a Certificate Authority (Cloudflare provides free SSL for sites that use its content delivery network).

By no means are all of these malicious, but many are suspicious—particularly since they include an abundance of sites that were bulk-configured using site templates, domains configured through low-cost registrars or subdomains configured on potentially compromised domains.

One host serving as home for a number of “covid-19” related web addresses—associated with a service that offers free websites and low cost domain name registration—had 11,322 domain names associated with it. Those domains appear to have been programmatically created and registered for certificates, as they follow the same naming pattern {covid-19[additional search keyword].com).

The raw number of domain names we’ve observed being registered that are related to the COVID-19 pandemic is even larger. On March 20, the peak day (so far), people registered 3011 new domains that contained the text “covid” or “corona,” in the four largest top-level domains (TLDs) we monitor (.com, .us. .org, and .info). Since February 8, we’ve observed 42,578 (as of midnight, March 24) newly-registered covid or corona domain names.

While some of these domains may have been registered for benign or even beneficial purposes, many are simply parked, while others are displaying basic, mostly empty website content as placeholders for some promised future content. Part of the collaboration on the Slack channels and with our partners at the Cyber Threat Alliance involves sorting out the useful and legitimate sites that may have been registered by legitimate health authorities from the dark humor, spammy, or actively malicious ones. It’s hard to know the intent of a domain registrant when there’s no content in—just for one weird example, there’s coronavirusshaquilleoneal[.]com.

Sophos has identified over 60 domains as actively malicious, though some of those domains have gone dark since we first detected them. The following specific sites have been linked to malware downloads, and are potential network indicators of compromise, but they are likely just the tip of the iceberg as far as malicious domains go:

corona-masr21.com
netflixcovid19s.com
chasecovid19v.com
chasecovid19t.com
chasecovid19s.com
corona-masr2.com
chase7-covid.com
masry-corona51.com
corona-virusapps.com
coronavirus-realtime.com
covid-19-gov.claims
corona-virus-map.net
corona-map-data.com
coronavirus-apps.com
childcarecorona.com
impots-covid19.com
corona-apps.com
coronaviruscovid19-information.com
coronations.usa.cc

[Update, March 27] One domain we’ve investigated, covid19hacks[.]com, is acting as a redirector gateway to a series of deceptive and potentially malicious download sites, including fake software update pages:

These pages are the end of a trail of forwarding HTTPS pages, on domains including:

covid19hacks.com
yourbig-prizenow2.life
mobile-app-market-here1.life
best.prizedea2040.info

[Update, 4/08]

One of the most prevalent scams related to COVID-19 are sites offering supplies or medicine to prevent or fight infections. Several are picking up on the promotion by some of Hydroxycloroquine and Azithromycin as drugs to help fight COVID-19 infections.

.Some of these sites forward to overseas pharmaceutical sites or to web stores offering filter masks; others have skeletal WordPress installations that appear to be placeholders for future phishing or spam sites. One offers a $9 book on how to create a “do-it-yourself vaccine” for coronavirus.

curecorona.co
zithromaxcovid19.com
jesse.hydroxychloroquinecovid-19cure.com
www.hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.com
coronacurethon.org 
diyvaccinecurecoronavirus.com
covidrx.ca
covidizerx.pl
corona-vaccine-info.com
corona-virus-vaccine.com

Others we’ve found are simply registered and parked, in the hope of selling them as part of the coronavirus “gold rush.”

The following sites were registered and park through reg.ru, a Russian domain registry, and may be potential pharmacy scam sites in the future:

covid-pharma.net
covid-pharma.net 
covid-pharma.net 
covid-pharma.org
covid-pharma.ru

Malware abusing anxiety over COVID

We’ve identified multiple malware families and potentially unwanted applications thus far communicating with COVID-19 related domains in some way. There are also ransomware that reference coronavirus in the ransom notes.

For example, three different versions of the DownloadGuide adware PUA were detected connecting to domains containing “COVID” or “Corona”. These may have been advertisements pushed to the adware randomly.

Additionally, a group of malicious files used the web host coronavirusstatus[.]space to host payloads or as a C2 server. They include:

An AutoIT dropper script, which we identify as Troj/AutoIt-CYW.
Corona.exe and isoburn.exe, both of which which we identify as Troj/PWS-CJJ and Troj/Steal-JZ.
Corona-virus-Map.com.exe (which we identify as Troj/MSIL-NZP).
The file aut6C13.tmp (which we identify as Troj/PWS-CJJ malware).

In addition to communicating with the host, this malware group also connects to the Telegram encrypted communications API server.

SHA256	Name/Filename
b326dd2cf05788cc2c0922e1553b98e6631c67b1cf7ec55228fa6f6db10e2249	DownloaderGuide
b326dd2cf05788cc2c0922e1553b98e6631c67b1cf7ec55228fa6f6db10e2249
796b4f9e36b280fb1fae0c55ef184e4fb44906966f258e421ff0721705fafb0f
2b35aa9c70ef66197abfb9bc409952897f9f70818633ab43da85b3825b256307	T Troj/AutoIt-CYW, Troj/MSIL-NZP / Corona-virus- Map.com.exe
13c0165703482dd521e1c1185838a6a12ed5e980e7951a130444cf2feed1102e	Troj/PWS-CJJ, Troj/Steal-JZ / corona.exe
fda64c0ac9be3d10c28035d12ac0f63d85bb0733e78fe634a51474c83d0a0df8	Troj/PWS-CJJ / isoburn.exe
0b3e7faa3ad28853bb2b2ef188b310a67663a96544076cd71c32ac088f9af74d	Troj/Steal-KA / aut6C13.tmp

These and additional IOCs will be added to our GitHub repository.

And it was inevitable that someone would eventually create a ransomware and call it Coronavirus.

Acknowledgments

SophosLabs wishes to acknowledge the efforts of Richard Cohen, Brett Cove, Krisztián Diriczi, Fraser Howard, Tamás Kocsír, and Chet Wisniewski to track down various threats, and the efforts of the Cyber Threat Alliance and the community of threat researchers on the COVID-19 Cyber Threat Coalition Slack channel for sharing a wide range of attack data with the wider community of security researchers and SOC analysts.

a project management tool for every business « Zoho Blog

Gone are the days when manufacturing industries, construction and software companies were the only major consumers of project management tools. Every industry has slowly evolved to understand the importance of using a project management methodology to handle all their tasks systemically.

ITS, a dental college in Northern India has started managing all their academic activities using Zoho Projects, our project management tool.

Dr. Gagandeep Arora, their Dean and a veteran in the educational industry, tells us how Zoho Projects has made life easier for him. His favorite feature in Projects is Templates. Dr. Arora says, “It took me 12 hours to plan a conference in 2018. And in 2020, using Projects, it took me just 3 minutes to plan the same conference”.

In 2018, when Dr. Arora had to plan an international conference, he spent a lot of time organizing it by creating tasks, milestones, custom fields and statuses, and assigning them to the right people. The templates feature helped Dr. Arora plan his conference in 2020 without having to redo everything he did in 2018. This also reduces the time and effort he would have to spend on planning other conferences in the future.

Mr. Vijay Sharma, Director of Admin Operations at ITS, spends most of his time on Zoho Projects monitoring the wide range of reports that are available.

Our Resource Utilization chart helps him understand how occupied his team is, helping him delegate work items effectively to strike the right balance. Another interesting way Mr. Sharma uses these reports is to rate staff performance based on the data that’s available from the Planned vs Actual report and Task Reports.

This helps him understand the performance of the ITS Dental College team during that specific academic year and make an informed decision while finalizing their Annual Performance Review.

Mr. Ashutosh Singh, the Head of Operations, is someone who is always busy with meetings and not often found at his desk. He uses the Projects mobile app to approve requests and assign tasks to individuals, helping him stay on top of things, even when he is on the go.

Since most of the ITS Dental College professors are at times busy traveling to global conferences, the collaboration features that Zoho Projects offers have been a great help to them. The integration with Zoho Meetings, for example, helps them get together for a quick digital meeting, no matter which part of the world they are in.

And that’s how ITS Dental college uses Zoho Projects to manage their work more efficiently. We’d love to hear your story as well and publish it here, to share with the whole Zoho community.

Submit your story

Establish a successful remote work environment with Orchestly « Zoho Blog

When there’s upheaval in the market, small and medium enterprises often take the first hit. And while larger companies have business continuity plans (BCPs) in place, individual teams within those companies often struggle to establish a setup that works for everyone. Why do SMEs, and individual teams at big enterprises, struggle? A lack of preparedness.

Many organizations face hurdles when it comes to equipping themselves to handle emergencies. We’re all human, and we’re sometimes wary of technology, or just set in our ways. We might prioritize today’s deliverables over tomorrow’s preparedness. We think “this can wait,” but the recent global crisis has taught us that the perfect time to prepare never arrives.

While having a business continuity plan is a whole topic in itself, for an SME that’s already been hurled into the remote work world, or for a leader heading a core team, here are some tips to help you steer clear of productivity pitfalls:

Stay focused

While letting your teammates know what you’ve done and what’s pending on their end is important, some people can go overboard and wind up just talking shop. How do you ensure task continuity? Simple. Use a workflow automation tool to run your process. Your tool will automatically notify you on what you need to do, and if you’re a manager, it will help you keep a tab on all your team’s work items.

Capture every detail

With processes come task dependencies, and dependencies aren’t just limited to human resources. For a process to flow smoothly, all the information about the process, like the requestor’s name, its priority, and related documentation must also be shared. When you’re all sitting one desk away from each other, getting what you need is easy. Unfortunately, that’s not the case when you work remotely. Missing important documents, or sending outdated ones is a risk, and it might not be discovered until much later. A workflow management tool, in addition to running your processes, will also help document all the details of every task passing through the system, and make it accessible for everyone involved.

Leverage work insights

In your office, all you had to do to stay up to date was ask your team members what they’d done, and record work progress on spreadsheets. But that can be a time-consuming task, especially if the entire team is working remotely. Well, now’s the perfect opportunity to map out all your processes into neat workflows and begin running all of it using a workflow automation tool. This way, you know everything that’s going on with your team—how much is pending, and who’s doing what—so you can allocate work accordingly. The exhaustive process data, performance insights, and custom reports provided by your tool will make tracking and reporting much easier.

Work from mobile

Trying times lead to revelations. Many jobs that were previously not possible from a “work from home” situation have suddenly become remote-friendly. This has given businesses the opportunity to revisit their policies and think of efficient ways to enable remote working. What better way to do it, than to switch to a tool that lets you track your work right from your phone? If you could simply use your phone to get notified of something that’s come your way, or to retrieve pending tasks, then you’re truly empowering your business and your workforce.

Ensure business continuity

If you’re a leader, you might manage a business, product, or service. But you’re also responsible for the team of people working with you. Analyze risks, identify solutions, and implement security measures for every functioning unit of your team—starting from data backups to ensuring workarounds for things you usually get done by working together. Having every possibility thought out and prepared for will benefit not just your business, but also your workforce. Remember, loyalty is hard-earned.

For organizations that can’t go remote

Hospitals, insurance companies, banks, essential commodity suppliers, transportation and shipping companies, media and telecom companies—what do all of them have in common? The nature of their work doesn’t let them go remote, or cease operations. How can such industries ensure their work goes on unhindered during emergencies?

Here’s how a tool like Orchestly can help essential services stay prepared:

Define your communication command center, and establish emergency communication lines to keep staff informed.
Make all the latest emergency preparedness materials accessible from a single location.
Quickly onboard new staff, and retrain or cross-train existing staff.
Record and keep track of all employees, equipment, issues, services, and processes.
Expedite purchase requests for essential equipment.
Conduct quality testing for manufactured/purchased equipment.
Ensure automated and on-demand sanitation and disinfection services within your premises.
Integrate Orchestly to run in sync with your usual applications—HIS, AMS, MRP, TMS, and ERP—so you can run your processes effortlessly.

During dire times such as this, you need to have all your systems in place to ensure work goes on uninterrupted—and for this, you can count on Orchestly.

If you’re ready to adapt to these changes, adopt Orchestly and empower your business and workforce to run smoothly, regardless of where you are.

Here’s how Zoho People eases remote workforce management

The rapid increase in the number of Coronavirus cases has made so many organizations adopt remote working. But the increased demand for remote work is not only due to the ongoing crisis.

As technology advances, remote work will become more and more prevalent in the business world. During this crisis and into the future beyond it, it’s essential to ensure that HR operations keep up with these changes. With this in mind, we’ve put together the different ways in which Zoho People facilitates remote workforce management:

Provides a hassle-free remote onboarding experience to new employees by consolidating all the required documents in a single location
Helps HR professionals and managers provide performance reviews to employees even while working remotely
Enables employees to mark their attendance regardless of their location
Organizes and handles employee cases efficiently
Allows employees to communicate and collaborate with each other
Records the time employees spend on different projects and eases payroll processing
Empowers employees to access essential HR documents and provides information about their attendance hours, time-off balances, insurance, and more.
Facilitates remote learning and helps course instructors conduct live online sessions
Collects vital information from employees and stores it online

Read more about how Zoho people facilitates remote work in our HR Knowledge Hive.

[Temporarily Unavailable] XG Firewall v18 MR1 – Release Notes & News – XG Firewall

The XG Firewall v18 MR1 release has been temporarily pulled.

Sophos has received reports from a subset of XG Firewall v18 MR1 systems, where the update has caused issues with traffic passing through the Firewall. Sophos strongly advises that users roll back to v18.0 GA-Build354 while our development teams work to resolve this.

More info: https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/135378

-FloSupport

Hi XG Community!

We’ve released XG Firewall v18 MR1.

Enhancements

Supports new SD-RED 20 and SD-RED 60 devices.
XG Firewall web console now shows granular reasons for firmware upload failure
Plus, more than 45 issues resolved in this release (refer Issues Resolved section below)
With the tremendous need for VPN connectivity in this challenging time, we have put together some important information here for you to achieve your networking needs:
1. To configure VPN Remote Access on your Sophos XG Firewall. Check out this useful Community post!
2. To substitute XG for RED devices via Light-Touch deployment from Sophos Central. Check out this useful Community post!

Note: Upgrade from SF 17.5 MR11 to v18.0 MR1 is now supported.

More on XG Firewall v18

Please refer XG Firewall v18 highlights for more details on all-new Xstream Architecture delivering extreme new levels of visibility, protection and performance. Also, check out our XG Firewall v18 playlist on YouTube to find out what’s new in XG Firewall v18!

Get it now!

As usual, this firmware update is no charge for all licensed XG Firewall customers. The firmware will be rolled-out automatically to all systems over the coming weeks but you can access the firmware anytime to do a manual update through Licensing Portal. You can refer this article for more information on How to upgrade the firmware.

For fresh installations, we will update this post with installer download links soon.

Things to know before upgrading

You can upgrade from SFOS 17.5 (MR6 to MR11) to 18.0 MR1. Check out the relevant sections of the XG v18 release notes for details on:

Issues Resolved

NC-30903 [Authentication] STAS configuration is editable via GUI on AUX machine
NC-50703 [Authentication] Access server restarted with coredump using STAS and Chrome SSO
NC-50716 [Authentication] Cannot import LDAP server via XMLAPI if client cert is “None”
NC-54689 [Authentication] Support download certificate for iOS 13 and above
NC-55277 [Authentication] Service “Chromebook SSO” is missing on Zone page
NC-51660 [Backup-Restore] Restore failed using a backup of XG135 on SG230 appliance
NC-55015 [Bridge] Wifi zone is not displayed while creating bridge
NC-55356 [Bridge] TCP connection fails for VLAN on bridge with HA Active-Active when source_client IP address is odd
NC-52616 [Certificates] Add support for uploading of CRLs in DER format
NC-55739 [Certificates] EC certificate shows up as “RSA” in SSLx CA cert dropdowns
NC-55305 [CM (Zero Touch)] System don’t restart on changing time zone while configured through ZeroTouch
NC-55617 [CM (Zero Touch)] Getting wrong error message in log viewer after ZeroTouch process
NC-55909 [Core Utils] Unable to see application object page on SFM
NC-30452 [CSC] Dynamic interface addresses not showing on Aux after failover
NC-54233 [CSC] EpollWorker coredump
NC-55386 [Dynamic Routing (PIM)] PIM-SM import fails with LAG as dependent entity
NC-55625 [Dynamic Routing (PIM)] In HA with multicast interface, routes are not getting updated in the Aux routing table
NC-55461 [Email] After adding/edit FQDN host with smarthost, it is not displayed on the list until refresh the page
NC-58898 [Email] Potential RCE through heap overflow in awarrensmtp (CVE-2020-11503)
NC-55635 [Firewall] Display filter for forwarded is not working properly on packet capture page
NC-55657 [Firewall] HA backup restore fails when port name is different in backup and appliance
NC-55884 [Firewall] IPS policy id and appfilter id not displaying in firewall allow log in logviewer
NC-55943 [Firewall] Failed to resume existing connection after removal of heartbeat from firewall configuration
NC-57084 [Firewall] Custom DMZ not listed in dedicated link HA configuration
NC-44938 [Firmware Management, UX] Web UI does not surface reasons for firmware upload failure
NC-55756 [Gateway Management] Gateway isn’t deleted from SFM UI after deleting it from SFM
NC-55552 [HA] WWAN interface showing in HA monitoring ports
NC-55281 [Import-Export Framework] Full configuration import fails when using third party certificate for webadmin setting
NC-55171 [Interface Management] VLAN Interface IP is not assigned via DHCP when gateway name uses some special characters
NC-55442 [Interface Management] DNS name lookup showing incorrect message
NC-55462 [Interface Management] Import fails on configuring Alias over VLAN
NC-55659 [Interface Management] Invalid gateway IP and network IP configured using API for IPv6
NC-56733 [Interface Management] Patch PPPd (CVE-2020-8597)
NC-51776 [IPS Engine] Edit IPS custom rule protocol doesn’t work after creation
NC-51558 [IPsec] Add warning message before deleting xfrm ipsec tunnel
NC-55309 [Logging] Local acl rule not created through log viewer for IPv4 and IPv6
NC-50413 [Logging Framework] Gateway up event log for PPPoE interface not always shown in logviewer
NC-55346 [Logging Framework] Clear All for “Content filtering” does not clear SSL/TLS filter option
NC-56831 [Policy Routing] SIP traffic sometimes not working with SDWAN policy route
NC-46009 [SecurityHeartbeat] Spontaneous reconnects of many endpoints
NC-51562 [SecurityHeartbeat] Heartbeat service not started after HA failover
NC-52225 [Synchronized App Control] SAC page loading issues as the list of apps increases
NC-54078 [UI Framework] Internet Explorer UI issue on certain rules and policies pages
NC-56821 [Up2Date Client] SSL VPN downloading with the 0KB
NC-54007 [Web] File type block messages sometimes contain mimetype rather than file type

Making the most of your new XG Firewall features

Free Online Training

Available for free for all XG Firewall customers, our delta training program will help you make the most of the new features in XG Firewall v18.
This online program walks you through the key enhancements since v17.5 and takes about 90 minutes to complete.

Customer Resources and How-To Videos

Also be sure to visit the Customer Resource Center for the latest How-To Videos and links to documentation, the community forums, training and other resources.

Take advantage of Partner and Sophos Professional Services

To augment your local Sophos partner’s services, we offer services to help you getting up and running and make the most of your XG Firewall, including the latest capabilities in v18.
While Sophos Professional Services can help with any task, here are the most common services they provide:
- XG Firewall deployment and setup
- XG Firewall v18 DPI, FastPath and SSL Engine Optimization
- XG Firewall Health Checks

Here are some direct links to helpful resources:

New to XG Firewall?

If you’re new to XG Firewall, see how it provides the world’s best network visibility, protection and response on the new XG Firewall website.

Powerful new EDR features now in early access for Intercept X – Sophos News

We are excited to announce that powerful new Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) features for Intercept X are now available in early access.

This early access program (EAP) brings pre-built, fully customizable SQL queries for both granular threat hunting and IT health checks and management across your organization’s estate. You can join the EAP now.

Live Discover

Live Discover allows you to examine your data for almost any question you can think of by searching across endpoints and servers with SQL queries.

You can choose from a selection of pre-created queries that can be fully customized to pull the exact information that you need.

IT operations and threat hunting sample questions include:

Why is a machine slow? Is it pending a reboot?
Are users running unauthorized browser extensions?
Have any processes had their registry keys or files modified recently?
Is remote sharing enabled? What about guest accounts?
What processes are attempting to make network connections on non-standard ports?

Live Response (coming in May to early access)

This feature gives you the ability to respond with precision. Using a cmdline interface, remotely access devices in order to perform further investigation or take action. For example:

Reboot a device pending updates
Terminate suspicious processes
Browse the file system
Edit configuration files
Run scripts and programs

How to join the EAP

The EAP is open to everyone that has Intercept X and Intercept X for Server, even if you don’t currently have EDR.

For full instructions on how to join and additional technical information please head over to the Sophos community. We look forward to hearing your feedback!