4 Steps to Immediately Protect Your Business from Cyberattack

By Amos Aesoph, Xigent CISO

The cyberattack last week at Colonial Pipeline doesn’t come as much of a surprise to security experts. According to Datto, in the past year companies have had a 200% increase in downtime costs from ransomware. And it’s not just the “big guys” that hackers are going after. In fact, 1 in 5 small- to mid-sized businesses reported that they had been infected with ransomware in the past year.

 

Over the past few days, we’ve had questions from Xigent customers concerned about whether they’re doing enough to maintain cybersecurity. While we can’t speak to the Colonial Pipeline incident, it’s an important question for every business to ask right now. Hackers are quite aware that smaller companies often don’t invest enough in cybersecurity. It’s the reason why 43% of data breaches last year involved small businesses. (Source – Verizon’s Data Breach Report.)

 

No company can guarantee 100% protection from cyberattacks, but there are steps that you can take today to protect your operations from disruption. I’d like to share with you the information that we’re providing to our customers about steps they can take today:

• Assess your risk. This latest incident illustrates the way that threats are constantly changing. If you haven’t looked at your security plan recently, it’s probably time to look again. We offer a cyber security assessment that can help you quantify your risk.
• Get help with a plan. A good plan should detect, identify, respond, protect and recover. It takes time and expertise to create procedures and plans and evaluate security technology. A consultant can put together a plan that meets your needs and budget.
• Train your employees. Verizon’s security report says that 34% of reported data breaches involved internal actors. You need to keep your employees up to date on security and engineering threats and best practices to avoid them.
• Test your backup and recovery. FEMA says 1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan. Getting your data back after a hack or ransomware incident is impossible if you don’t put the right steps in place and regularly test to make sure they work.

 

If any of these action items are on your list, Xigent can help you. I’m happy to chat about what you can do today to make sure that your business is not the next cyberattack cautionary tale.

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