With our increased reliance upon technology to power our business, it's more important than ever that our IT systems are behaving as they're supposed to in order to keep business running smoothly. As small businesses, IT is often overlooked as being critical, yet we take for granted that it's always there.
With 40% of cyber attacks targeting businesses with fewer than 500 employees, it's clear that cybersecurity isn't just the domain of large corporations, but a legitmate concern for smaller enterprises. It's therefore quite probable that many of us will at some point experience some kind of hacking attack against our computer systems. With this sense of inevitability, despite all we do to protect ourselves, what should we do?
It can seem daunting to figure out how to start, but being prepared is clearly the best strategy. Working with some of my clients, it quickly becomes obvious that having a plan in place could have significantly reduced the impact to the business when the bad stuff hits. Quite often, understanding what has happened is one of the most difficult questions to answer. We have all seen the knee-jerk reaction when people claim they've "been hacked", but unless we know exactly how that happened, it's difficult to bring an appropriate response and to protect against that type of attack in the future.
I've seen several businesses that fight viruses like they're 'business-as-usual'. They find them, they clean them and a few days later, something else is back. If they're lucky it's just a nuisance (and maybe money spent to their IT support provider) but in some cases it can lead to disaster. As attackers get more sophisticated, we're beginning to see more and more that holding data to ransom, and destroying it if one doesn't pay up, is a good business model for them. 40% of small businesses don't have an incident response plan.
So, it's important to actually investigate the cause of security breaches, to understand how it happened and exactly what happened. I'm always amazed by startup companies in 'stealth mode' that do all they can to avoid talking about their secret new technology, yet do nothing to protect against attackers hacking into their computers and stealing it right off their desktop! Sure enough, competitors appear and as if by magic, they seem eerily familiar.
When you next get hacked -- whether it's obvious (things popping up, website being defaced, etc.) or something just not feeling right (computer running more slowly, internet usage suddenly increasing, etc.) you should consider calling in someone that can look to see what happened, and suggest steps to prevent it in the future. Next time it might be the last time.
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