Shootings, Cyber Breaches and Your Business

Over the weekend in Allen Texas, there was yet another deranged idiot that decided to take his own inadequacies, mental health challenges and failures in life out on others. There is still little known about the shooter other than that he's an adult loser living with his parents and felon brother at times and in a budget weekly rental the rest of the time. What his issue was, I have very little care for once he chose to hurt others, but am very grateful that there happened to be a police officer nearby to stop the threat!

Why don't we know much about the shooter? Well, the City of Dallas suffered a Ransomware incident a few days before the shooting and more than 4 days later they have still not recovered/restored normal operations. This is effecting the police, fire, and other city services and causing delays in responses to calls for service. Meaning that people are in more danger and have to wait longer for emergency responses, and the cops and firefighters are in more danger, as they don't have access to critical information about calls they go out on. If that Hero Cop had not luckily been nearby, because of this breach there may have been a delay of minutes or more, and even a few minutes of delay would have resulted in many more casualties! This is unacceptable!

I don't know the particulars about the breach or how it happened, but it will most likely come down to a computer system or server not being properly patched, Multi-factor Authentication disabled, a staff member not having been trained on spotting phishing emails and clicked on a link and entered their credentials,  random systems unprotected from malicious software, lack of a good backup/disaster recovery solution, or a combinations of these things.

While this is a very embarrassing situation and people may actually die as a result, the City of Dallas will be ok in the long run, as their customers can't easily switch cities over this and they can afford to pay the recovery costs (with other people's money). Can you say the same about your medical practice or business? Are your customers or patients as stuck with you as the constituents of a city? I'll bet they are not!

Ask yourself, is it cheaper to hope that you are never the victim of such a breach and then deal with the consequences when you eventually are, or to do the right thing and invest in some prevention and staff training? Based upon the daily flood of Phishing Emails we see, the number of our clients that received malicious emails from compromised accounts of people they do business with and the failures we see when running simulated Phishing Campaigns, I can say with certainty that without some effort, you will be compromised!

Lets do something about this together! Give us a call at 702-553-3200