Why pay attention to Cyber-Security?

If you have spent years building your business you need to protect the value, you have built up. Quite simply Cyber-crime is about theft of money. Money is what motivates criminals. The ease of stealing money online, the low risk of getting caught and the high rewards are highly motivating for criminals.

Over the past 10 years we have seen an explosion in the use of IT to replace many manual tasks. We now perform our banking exclusively online, we store our client data and process client work in cloud based systems. Our communications are largely online with email and Zoom or Teams calls. This explosion in the use of IT has also come with a corresponding outbreak in the utilisation of IT to commit crimes.

Information is Money

Criminals who break into your email systems can trick your clients into paying money into their accounts. Stolen credit card information can be used to purchase goods which are then sold for money. Stealing personal data such as drivers’ licenses, birth dates, and passport numbers can be used to steal identities and create false loans. Criminals don’t even need to steal data, they can encrypt your files and demand a ransom to unlock them. They know you place a high value on your information, and you will pay to have it returned.

So how much is your information worth? Many businesses would survive if their office burnt down. They would simply relocate, set up new computers, and they would be back in business in days. However, many businesses would not survive serious cyber-attack. Consider not being able to operate for a week or a month. You don’t have access to your client information, you can’t process any client work, and you can’t send or receive any correspondence. Worse still, you need to tell your clients that their data has been stolen and deal with lawyers and the authorities’ demanding answers on why the breach occurred. The damage to your reputation alone could sink your business.

So, the information in your business could be worth as much as 100% of the value of your business.

Criminals know that, and that motivates them to attempt ransom activities. If you think that small and medium businesses are immune from these attacks that would be a big mistake.

Because smaller businesses often have weaker security they represent easy targets for Cyber criminals. Also remember that as a business you are the custodian of a lot of very sensitive and personal client information.

Clients will be extremely unhappy if their data gets breached from your systems. Increasingly you may be liable for any loss of their data from your systems. Their data is worth money to criminals because loss of data will result in increased crimes such as identity theft, credit card theft and use of their accounts to commit further crime. Authorities are also cracking down on weak security and gradually implementing tighter and tighter requirements on businesses to keep data safe. And so they should.