Importance of Cyber Attack Protection for Small and Medium Companies
We’ve talked about this before, but it’s important to remember that protecting against a cyber attack is important even for small and medium companies. We’ve all seen the big hacks that have come out—the CDK attack that happened to car dealerships, the attack that hit AT&T. Those are high-profile, but there are hundreds or thousands of smaller cyber attacks that happen every single day to small businesses, and those can be devastating.

Impact on Small Businesses
Imagine you’re a small business; it doesn’t matter what you’re in—you don’t even have to be in tech. You could be a hot dog stand. If your business has a cyber attack and you can’t collect payments, make payments to vendors, access your accounts receivable, or take online orders, you’re basically out of business. These hackers use ransomware, where they lock up your system and make you pay a ransom. Otherwise, you can’t continue business, and it can be devastating.

Worse than Physical Damage
It’s worse than if your building burned down. If your building burned down, you could find extra space, buy a couple of computers at Walmart, and be back in business in no time. The problem with a cyber attack is that once it takes place, you’re out of control. You don’t have control over any parts of your business, and unless you pay the ransom, you don’t know if you’ll ever get control back.

Lack of Response Plans
The other problem is most companies don’t have a response plan in place before it happens. For example, in your business, you might have fire exits, fire procedures, or employment posters telling you what to do in certain scenarios, but there’s rarely a set procedure for a cyber attack. What you need is a plan in place so you know what to do, especially without computers. You want to have it written in a manual, documented, so you can access it even if your computers are down.

Active Monitoring
The other thing you want to do is have active monitoring. Most of these attacks start several months before they hit. Hackers go into your network, sit there, and monitor, absorbing data, watching emails, tracking passwords, and gathering all the information they need to launch the attack later. If you have active monitoring on your network, you can detect their presence and prevent the attack. Almost all cyber attacks could have been prevented if discovered in the weeks before. The big CDK attack that hit 15,000 car dealerships was sitting on the network for about four months before it was detected.

How to Protect Your Network
Now, how do you do that? You can have your IT department take a look at it, but many hackers know how to evade detection by a normal IT department. However, if you have cyber liability insurance, most larger insurance companies, like Chubb, will provide active monitoring for your network and have a response plan in place.

The Risks of Not Acting
According to an Inc. magazine survey, 60% of businesses that experienced a cyber attack closed down within six months because they couldn’t recover. That’s scary. Make sure you have best practices in place to prevent cyber attacks from happening and a response plan if they do occur. For more information, you can visit riskcoverage.com, which offers insights into different techniques and systems to prevent and insure against cyber attacks.