How Does Your Business Manage Risk?
Unfortunately, most small businesses today have never performed a risk assessment, and have no plans for how to identifiy and address the risks to their business. Some may assume ‘We have antivirus, we’re good.’
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
I don’t want to scare you, but viruses are the least of your concern, human-error accounts for far more damage to small businesses. But let’s look at one statistic, Phishing.
In 2019 alone, 65% of U.S. organizations experienced a successful phishing attack (2020 State of the Phish, Proofpoint). But, what exactly happens when an organization experiences a phishing attack and how could it impact YOU?
Lost Data & Ransomware:
Cyber criminals are running a business, and their goal is to make a profit out of manipulating their unsuspecting victims. Many phishing attacks aim to infect your computer or network with ransomware which locks your computer files and demands a payment to unlock them. The worst part? Even when paid their asking price, criminals have been known to delete the data anyway.
Financial Losses:
There is only a financial impact if the phishing attack involves ransomware, right? With more regulations built to protect consumers, even when a ransom isn’t involved, the remediation costs can put a serious financial strain on any organization. That could mean layoffs, cutbacks, and even closed business doors for your organization.
Reputation Damage:
Businesses pride themselves on their positive reputation in their community. What happens when you lose that trust? People do business with companies they trust. They entrust you with their personal information, their credit card data, and more that, if compromised, could put them at risk of identity theft. When you break this trust, building back long-lasting relationships and repeat customers can take years.
Personal Impact:
Phishing only impacts my employer, why should I care about cybersecurity at all? It doesn’t personally impact me. For serious incidents, you could face severe consequences, which could even include possible termination. But phishing doesn’t just impact you professionally. It’s important to remember phishing attacks happen on personal email accounts and can impact you and your loved ones - cyber criminals don’t discriminate.
How Can We Help You?
We recommend annual SRAs (Security Risk Analysis) to identify the risks to your business. Then we suggest creating remediation plans for each identified risk. Then, we can help you implement the plan that mitigates the risk, or perhaps removes the risk entirely.
Of course, this is possible to do by searching Google for SRAs and you can certainly cobble together the documents and questionaires, watch YouTube videos to see how the process works, and you can probably figure it out on your own. But… a DIY approach is a substantial investment in your time, you could spend many dozens of hours every year. I would wager, though, that your time is too valuable for that.
We have a full-featured risk management application that provides all the tools, training and expertise to develop a dependable risk managment system. We can assist you in your SRA, we can develop your remediation plans, and implement them for you. And since we mentioned Phishing, we have access to AI-driven phishing filter systems to address that specific risk. Here is an example of the end-user training we provide for helping your staff understand Phishing risks. We would be happy to talk to about what we can do for your business.