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The Expert Podcast brings you firsthand narratives from experts across diverse industries, including private investigators, general contractors and builders, insurance agencies, vehicle specialists, lawyers, and many others.
We've talked about this before, but it's important to remember that protecting against a cyber attack is important even for small and medium companies. We've all seen the big hacks that have come out—the CDK attack that happened to car dealerships, the attack that hit AT&T. Those are high-profile, but there are hundreds or thousands of smaller cyber attacks that happen every single day to small businesses, and those can be devastating.
Imagine you're a small business; it doesn't matter what you're in—you don't even have to be in tech. You could be a hot dog stand. If your business has a cyber attack and you can't collect payments, you can't make payments to vendors, you can't access your accounts receivable, or maybe you can't take online orders if you're a small company that people order online from. If they can't order, you're basically out of business. These hackers use what they call ransomware, where they lock up your system and make you pay a ransom; otherwise, you can't continue business. It can be devastating. It's worse than if your building burned down because if your building burned down, you can find some extra space, buy a couple of computers at Walmart, and be back in business in no time. The problem with a cyber attack is that once it takes place, you're kind of out of control. You don't have control over any parts of your business or most of them, and unless you pay the ransom, you don't know if you'll ever get back control.
The other problem is that most companies don't have a response plan in place before it happens. For example, I'm sure you have in your business little signs on the wall like fire exits, fire procedures, and what you do in certain scenarios. There are those employment posters on the wall in your lunchroom that tell you what to do in certain scenarios, but there's really no set procedure for a cyber attack. So, what you want to do is have a plan in place so you know what to do, especially if you don't have computers. You want to have it written in a manual, documented, so you can—you will be back in your video in just a few seconds. In the meantime, remember that actualhuman.com offers you live one-on-one private video consultation with an expert in this exact subject. We want to listen to your story, hear your questions, give you expert advisement on your options, and tell you what we know about your particular situation. Now, back to your video.
The other thing you want to do is have active monitoring. Most of these attacks start several months before they hit. They go into your network, they sit there, and they monitor, absorb data, watch emails, track passwords, and get all the information they need to launch the attack. Then they launch it later. Well, if you have active monitoring on your network, you'll see that they're there, and you can prevent it. Almost all of the cyber attacks that have happened could have been prevented if they were discovered in the weeks or two before. For example, the big CDK attack that hit all the car dealerships—15,000 new car dealerships in the country—was sitting on the network for, they believe, four months, and it could have been detected. Now, how do you do that? Well, you can have your IT department take a look at it. A lot of these hackers know how to evade detection by a normal IT department. Or if you have cyber liability insurance, a cyber insurance policy, most insurance companies—the larger ones like Chubb or anything else—will put active monitoring on your network for you, and they'll have a response plan too.
The reason you want to do all this, as you can see in the article, is that Inc. magazine did a survey and found that 60% of businesses that had a cyber attack closed down within six months. That's scary because they couldn't recover. So make sure you at least have the best practices in place to prevent it from happening, have some best practices on how to respond if it does happen, and you can click the link below. Riskcoverage.com will give you some information on different techniques and systems you can put in place to prevent it and also to ensure against it. If you have any questions, you can select actualhuman.com as our consultation website. You can book a live one-on-one consultation or even ask a question directly to a licensed security analyst.
Thank you for watching another video at actualhuman.com and Describe TV. Remember, if you have questions or comments about our videos, put them in the link below. Also, remember that you have availability and access to live one-on-one question and answer consultation with a licensed expert in a number of fields: investigations, insurance, surety bonds, civil court mediation, even things like real estate records research, real estate brokers, real estate mortgage lenders. In addition, you'll find experts available in business segments such as business development, marketing, advertising, and certified license experts. So if you do find this content valuable and you want to delve more deeply into a subject, you can't ask YouTube a question, right? But if you want to talk to somebody live and actualhuman, use the link below. Thanks for watching.