When it comes to cybersecurity, defense and education are key
There is no magic piece of software or hardware that will completely protect IT. We leverage best practices and a layered approach to cybersecurity to protect our clients' networks, all from our office located right here in Lexington, KY.
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The SMB challenge
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The SMB (small-medium business) sector is silently taking the brunt of cyber attacks.
- Nearly one-in-three breaches involve small businesses. Size doesn't matter when it comes to attacks because SMBs have money. (Source: Verizon's 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report)
- Ransomware is a top threat. Thanks to the anonymity of BitCoin, ransomware is an easy, and very lucrative, source of income for bad actors. Adding extortion to the encryption of the data makes it even more damaging. The estimated cost of ransomware in 2020 was $20 billion. (Source: Forbes.com)
- Email phishing is also a top threat. Employees continue to be the weakest link. One of our client's business partners lost over $400,000 due to an email phish and this was a very small business. These types of losses happen daily and only encourage bad actors to attack more SMBs.
- Cyber attacks are expanding to include remote work, IoT (Internet of Things) and supply chains. More people are doing business over the internet, thanks to COVID, and the bad actors have taken notice.
Check out our blog article, How Do People Get Hacked? for more cybersecurity information.
What can be done?
Defense and education are key. We take defending our clients' IT environments very seriously. Our goal is improve productivity of our clients while keeping the bad guys out. To help educate the public, we offer public speaking and training for businesses and organizations (click here for more information). Most of our blog articles revolve around cybersecurity. Our blog article, 10 Tips to Help Protect Your Organization from Ransomware, is just one example of our many articles to help SMBs. The Next Century Technologies YouTube channel features recordings of some of our most popular webinars on topics such as ransomware, cybersecurity and business productivity. Check it out here.
What if you are not under any regulatory requirements for cybersecurity? Most of the tools we leverage for our bank and HIPAA clients are the same used for the rest of our clients. We have partnered with security powerhouses like Sophos, Datto, Infosec Chicago, Perch Security and BreachSecureNow to build a stack of services that can defend against almost any kind of cyber attack. Our IT Managed Services offer several plans to fit a variety of budgets and needs. Our Security Plus Package can be added on to plans to extend cyber defenses.
Best practices. We follow best practices from CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) as well as leveraging industry best practices we use from our years working with our HIPAA and banking clients. For great tips and best practices, check out our blog article, Cybersecurity Tips for Businesses.
Risk assessments too. We leverage risk assessments to identify and mediate threats to our clients. Our HIPAA, banking and CPA clients require risk assessments. However, any business can benefit from a risk assessment and greatly improve their cyber defenses by mediating vulnerabilities. To learn more about risk assessments, check out our blog article, What is a Risk Assessment?.
Employees, the weakest link. Unfortunately, phishing scams have improved dramatically and are the number one source of ransomware attacks. We offer employee cyber-awareness training as well as simulated phishing attacks to help you identify who on your team is vulnerable to scams. The monthly newsletter will keep cybersecurity top-of-mind with the latest threats and scams. Check out our blog article, How Do You Protect Your Company from Employee Errors?.
Manage those passwords! We do with our awesome enterprise-grade password management system. We utilize this system internally as well as at our bank and HIPAA clients. We provide the training to get your staff up and running with it as quick as possible. Yes you can make every password unique and feel confident your passwords are safe!
The dark web - is it really all that important? The password used to infiltrate the Colonial Pipeline was found on the dark web. We have a monitoring service that will notify you if your emails and passwords appear on the dark web.
If you are here looking for help with cybersecurity, give us a call.
We want to help. You can reach us at (859) 245-0582. You can also schedule a call with us here.
Are you an IT person looking to improve your company's cybersecurity? Great! We can partner with you and your company to make your IT better by taking offering our tools, processes and resources. We call it "co-managed IT" or CoMITs, and we would love to help. Learn more about all our services and CoMITs here. Call us at (859) 245-0582 to see if CoMITs is a good fit for you.