Quick Intelligence Blog

When you opened your business, you knew you needed some basic insurance, like fire and theft, but have you thought about cyber insurance? Wikipedia defines cyber insurance as, “a specialty lines insurance product intended to protect businesses, and individuals providing services for such businesses, from Internet-based risks, and more generally from risks relating to information technology infrastructure, information privacy, information governance liability, and activities related thereto.”

You may have heard about companies who take to shaming employees who have unintentionally caused a cyber incident at work. While it’s true that all it takes is one wrong click by a staff member, shaming staff isn’t the way to better cyber security.

Many business owners, especially of SMBs, take to the wearing of many hats to grow a successful business. They feel they need to do it all themselves. But is this true about cyber security? Can you do it all on your own? Should you do it all on your own?

Ransomware is malicious software designed to make your computer inaccessible by encrypting all of the files and holding them hostage for a substantial ransom. If your computer is connected to a network, it will usually try to spread to any other computers on the network and infect their files too. Recently, Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods suffered ransomware attacks that affected production and forced those companies to pay a huge ransom.

What are phishing attacks? Phishing attacks are a social engineering method to either fraudulently obtain your information or to trick you into downloading malware. The goal of the phisher is to compromise your network or data. Phishing attacks work because they disguise their communication or web pages as being from a trusted source, making you believe the request is real and prompting you to take an action like clicking on a bad link or giving up information.

Ransomware isn’t a new threat to business. It has been around for a long while, but lately it seems we are bombarded with news stories about ransomware. Two recent ones of note have been the cyber attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS Meats. In both cases they agreed to pay the ransom. So, why is this a problem?

Many people believe that cyber security is an expensive luxury item that only large enterprises can afford. They think that as a small enterprise “we don't have anything of value anyone would want to steal?” or that “we are too small and unimportant to be targeted by cyber criminals.”

Many businesses have started to make the switch from company-provided equipment to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). As an employer, this has many advantages: you don’t have to buy your employees a device to work on and the employee gets to use whatever form factor they’re comfortable with and used to, be it Microsoft or Mac, smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

On June 4^th, Fujifilm disclosed that they had in fact suffered a ransomware attack on June 1^st that disrupted its business operations. The disruption prevented access to email, the billing system, and a reporting system. It affected the Japanese network, as well as the company’s computer systems in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Simply put, cyber security encompasses everything businesses (large and small) and individuals require to prevent unauthorized access to networks, devices, and ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and ensuring the availability of information. Without cyber security, it could possibly lead to the disruption of your business operations.