When discussing the practice of monitoring solutions to prevent threats, it isn’t uncommon for many businesses to put these concerns on the back burner. However, every so often, an example comes around to help inspire businesses to take their monitoring seriously. This time, the example was the arrest of 24 spammers in October for scamming American citizens by impersonating Microsoft support staff members.
Nearly 90% of small business owners falsely believe that they are immune from cyber-attack. The fact is, that over half of those same businesses will fall victim to a malicious ransomware, malware or intrusion, and it is not a question of if it could happen. Business owners must assume that a potential attack will happen at some point in the future, and act on that knowledge to defend their business networks, systems and data.
On March 22, 2018, a remote-triggered ransomware called “SamSam” demanded a one-time payment of $51,000 be made to restore the city of Atlanta, Georgia’s, data. Despite an operating budget somewhere in the neighborhood of $625 million, Atlanta’s municipal leaders refused to pay the fine. The “hostage situation” has cost the city over $2 million already with an expected $9.5 million more likely to be spent restoring and re-enforcing the municipality’s network and infrastructure. This doesn’t take into account downtime and the significant amount of data lost in the hack. Whether or not you think it’s a good idea to not pay the ransom, if a whole city – especially one as large as Atlanta – can effectively be crippled by a single hack, you better believe that your business has to get serious about its cybersecurity efforts.
It’s been roughly six months since the Meltdown and Spectre exploits became public knowledge. A lot has changed since then with manufacturers and developers working tirelessly to release patches to mitigate the problems. Even with all the work, the exploits are still causing their fair share of issues. What’s been going on in the battle between developers and Meltdown and Spectre?
As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies gain value and popularity, more people will become familiar with blockchain. While blockchain is most associated with cryptocurrency, it’s easy to overlook just how many uses and benefits the technology has. Blockchain could fundamentally change every single industry with its focus on security, transparency, and privacy.
There are two areas that you need to remember to keep your business secure. First is digital security. With more and more business moving to digital, you need to secure your company’s data and have proper measures in place to protect it. Second is physical security. This is an area that shouldn’t be forgotten. Just because most of your work is done digitally doesn’t mean you don’t need to protect it physically.
