Defense One’s Cybersecurity Insights
Defense One is an excellent industry publication for security and cyber threats, and they have a very, very well-written article this week about treating cybersecurity like it matters, having an investigative board. So here’s how they promote it: When an airplane crashes, investigative bodies leap into action, and you see the FAA, National Highway Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), all those kinds of things.

Comparison of Cyber Attacks and Physical Crashes
But when a cyber attack happens, you don’t see the same thing. And the cyber attack can do as much damage and sometimes kill people, and there’s no central response to it. So this suggestion, you can see it says right here, is very relevant in today’s modern security culture. At the very least, as a company, you should have some type of active monitoring for your network, and you should have a response team, a response protocol.

Benefits of Cyber Insurance
The easiest way to get those self-serving, I get it, is to buy a cyber insurance policy. Certainly, you’re going to get some other advantages. You’ll have insurance and coverage if something happens—it’ll pay for some damages—but more than anything else, there’s a turnkey process in place for active monitoring. So they monitor your network all the time and for a response team, so if you do get some type of a hacking event, you just pick up the phone, call them up, and they send a response to you. Most policies have this—make sure if you’re going to buy insurance that you verify with your agent that it has this coverage in it.

Cost Comparison Between DIY Monitoring and Insurance
The way to do it—if you did active monitoring on your own and put a response team in place and a response protocol—it would cost you more than just getting an insurance policy. And the insurance policy gives you coverage when something goes wrong.

The Call for a National Response to Cyber Attacks
Anyway, without regard to that, there should be a more robust national response and investigations of these hacks. You have the CrowdStrike hack that happened, the CDK hack that happened just in the last 60 to 90 days. There were two major hacks—the big Las Vegas cyber infiltration that happened at the end of last year, 2023. These are costing billions of dollars and putting people’s lives at risk. So there should be a more national response at the government level to these hacks.

Preparing for Potential Cyber Disruptions
And I’m sure that’ll happen in the next few years. But in the meantime, you have to fend for yourself. Make sure you’re prepared for it. Make sure you have all your contingencies in place. What would happen if your bank goes down, your merchant account goes down, your payroll goes down, your accounts receivable—how would you get your cash flow still flowing if these things happen? How do you get a hold of your customers if you can’t get a hold of your CRM? Salesforce goes out of business for a week. What do you do, hypothetically?

Emphasis on Vigilance in Cybersecurity
Be very vigilant about your cybersecurity. You can click the link below if you want more information on that. But more and more cybersecurity professionals are saying, “Let’s treat it like it matters,” because it’s almost like people don’t think it matters until it happens to them.