5 tips to reduce your vulnerability to cyberattacks

By Aaron Welling

Six trillion dollars.

It’s a large sum and one that warrants a better understanding. How much is $6,000,000,000,000?

• It’s the estimated cost of the war on terror.
• It’s slightly larger than the gross domestic product of Japan ($5.4 trillion).
• It’s six times the value of Apple.
• And it’s the projected annual cost of cybercrimes by 2021. In 2015, it was $3 trillion.

Aaron Welling,

Cybercrime has become a global nightmare. It affects all businesses, large and small, as well as nonprofits and municipalities.

CNN Business reported in early October that in the last 10 months 140 local governments, police stations and hospitals have been held hostage by ransomware. It further stated that the actual numbers of cyberattacks across all sectors is in the thousands. There is no recorded number though, since most cyberattacks don’t become public because of the damage to reputation and loss of consumer confidence. 

This year, it’s evident that it’s not just companies that are being hit. Government agencies, municipalities, regional airports, school districts, colleges, nonprofits and churches are finding that no one is safe from cyberattacks.

The cost of surviving a data breach is significant. The Ponemon Institute stated that the cost of the average data breach to a U.S. company was $7.91 million. Those are big numbers, but that’s also figuring in big organizations like Equifax, Facebook, Marriott and the city of Baltimore whose costs (thus far) are:

• Equifax: $1.4 billion, plus $700 million in fines
• Facebook: $5 billion in fines
• Marriott: $72 million
• The city of Baltimore: $18 million

When it comes to a small or medium businesses (less than 1,000 employees), the average cost for recovery from a cyberattack is around $80,000. That’s no small amount and is sure to affect your bottom line. So how do you ensure it doesn’t happen to you?

Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee of staying safe from a cyberattack. Cybersecurity experts say it’s not a matter of if you’re hit, it’s a matter of when. But you can take steps to ensure that you’re less likely to be affected and lessen the blow once you are.

Here are five simple tips for preventing and mitigating the effects of cyberattacks on your organization:

1. Keep systems current. Ensure your hardware and software is being patched regularly and running up-to-date versions. This makes you less vulnerable to breaches via brute force attacks.
2. Make sure you have proper backups. Backups are a must for any business and should be done daily, if not hourly. Ask your information technology provider for a copy of the backup logs for the last month. If they’re not current, look for a new solution.
3. Use multifactor authentication and stronger passwords. Don’t opt out of multi- or two-factor authentication. Your account is safer with this protocol. And ensure that you’re using pass-phrases, not passwords. A string of words put together is exponentially more difficult to crack than a password. Both are annoying to use but worth the effort in the long run.
4. Educate employees. Ninety percent of all breaches are the result of phishing emails. Your IT may be secure, but it only takes one person to click the wrong thing and bring everything down. Talk about cybersecurity with employees often and encourage non-email communication when money or info transfer is involved. Also, consider running phishing simulations to find your weakest links.
5. Get cybersecurity insurance. You can do this through your current business insurance provider. The cost is minimal compared to what you would pay for lost business, lost reputation, and the cost to get your system back up after a cyberattack.

Cyberattacks aren’t going away anytime soon, but with vigilance and diligence, your organization can be better protected against attacks, detect them when they happen and respond quickly to keep you up and running.

Aaron Welling is a business intelligence and technology strategist at Teknologize in Kennewick.