There are two types of businesses: those that have been hacked and know it, and those that have been hacked and don’t know it.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your company has been hacked at some point over the past few years, and the chances of it happening again increase almost daily, according to local cybersecurity expert Haggai Davis II, director of sales for EMCO Technologies.
“In 2016 alone, there were 367 million unique pieces of malware created,” said Davis in a lunchtime speech this afternoon to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club. “That’s more than one per day and it’s gotten worse in the past two years.”
Small and medium-sized businesses are particularly vulnerable, and more than half of those that fall prey to a ransomware attack end up going out of business within six months, according to another 2016 statistic Davis cited.
Employees pose the greatest threat to a company’s cybersecurity, whether by compromising the network password—“How many of you keep your password taped to the bottom of your computer?” Davis asked—or bringing infected devices from home and connecting them to the company network. Employees also put their companies at risk by failing to close or log off from their computers before leaving for the day, and, above all, by clicking on bogus attachments or social media requests that come via email.
“Ask yourself why a business coach in Kuala Lumpur would want to join your LinkedIn network in Baton Rouge,” he said.
To protect your business against cyberattacks, Davis recommends several measures:
- Conduct company-wide training at least once a year to make your employees are aware of your firm’s cyber policy.
- Install next generation firewalls and antivirus software. “If you have a firewall from 2009, you don’t have much of a firewall,” he said.
- Have a backup and disaster recovery plan that follows the 3-2-1 rule, which is to keep three copies of your data on two different media, at least one of which is offsite.
Additionally, Davis stressed the importance of assuming every email has “the plague,” which means not to open attachments, click on links, or forward emails that have already been forwarded multiple times.
He also reminded his audience of a couple of salient truths that govern the digital universe:
“The delusion of privacy ended with the beginning of Google,” he said. “And on the internet, if you’re not paying for it you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”
