When you hear units like Zettabytes, Terabytes, and Yottabytes, do you first wonder if those are fancy coffee shop beverage sizes? Do you automatically recognize they are measurements of digital storage? Can it be slightly concerning at times how much we digitally-don’t-know? Well rest assured, I’d venture to say the average individual has no clue the names of digital units, how to convert those units and what they represent, we’ll leave that task to the trusty IT professionals and the handy Google conversion calculators. The fact of the matter is, these hackers are speaking an entirely different lingo and cyber-attack statistics would confirm that they are rockin’ it.
It is time to take control of our clicking, lock down our liabilities and bring our peace of mind back for our businesses. When we look at our own organization, WalkerHughes, the companies we partner with, the businesses we insure, one thing is clear – the people within those organizations are the heartbeat of the operations. Many extraordinary companies would not exist if it weren’t for the people within them. However, with regards to cyber security, people are unfortunately the weakest link in a lot of those procedures.
So - How Do We Break the Cycle?
People being identified as a weak link isn’t necessarily negative considering most business owners also recognize the people within their organizations as the best in the business. We break this cycle by empowering our people. Through education. Through communication. By keeping this topic top of mind. Train our people to click smarter, look deeper, incorporate more redundancies to double and triple check digital requests. Receive something phishy? Share it within your organization so others are aware. Belong to networking groups or industry message boards? Share the types of phishy requests you are seeing so others are aware. Cyber prevention is a team sport and it is time for organizations and industries to unite as cybercrime is figuratively the modern-day ‘neighborhood game of cops and robbers’, the representation of good vs. bad.
How frequently are these attempts hitting your inbox? Monthly? Weekly? Daily? An average of 4.8 a day according to Avanan, a cloud security platform. They have an awesome infographic depicting how email became the weakest link. Speaking of Avanan, they released their 2019 “Global Phish Report”, where their security scientists analyzed 55.5 million emails and the findings report that one in every 99 emails is a phishing attack, using malicious links and attachments. Of the phishing attacks they analyzed, 25% bypassed Office 365 security. That percentage is likely to increase as hackers design new methods that take advantage of vulnerabilities within those platforms. This report is a good read and the content is an even better share if you are looking for additional information to continue confronting phishing attempts and cyber-attacks within your organization.
There was a recent list published by IT Governance representing all the data breaches and cyber attacks in July of 2019 alone accounting for 2.3 billion records leaked. Featured on this list includes health services, governments at the city, county and state levels, educational institutions, many industries are represented, and many, many records are impacted. If you are looking for some light reading material, the links to the news stories of all these breaches and attacks are contained within the linked post. If you don’t want to read the full articles, scroll through the headlines for a great representation of how many breaches have truly taken place in just one months’ time. This is a good eye-opening representation to share exactly how many organizations are falling victim to this fraudulent activity.
Still Think A Cyber Attack Can't Happen to You?
If you’ve been with us these last few weeks as we dove deep into the depths of Cyber Liability, data breach, and prevention tips, you’re probably catching on by now that this a threat that insurance professionals like ourselves don’t think is going anywhere anytime soon. It is safe to say the analytics behind those attacks support that assumption. While we wrap up this four-part cyber series, we want to highlight that at WalkerHughes we view insurance, including Cyber Liability insurance, as a partnership. We have the companies who specialize in it, we have the coverage solutions, we have the expertise to get the right coverages in force for your business; we want to partner with you to prevent these attacks and we hope these posts have provided some thought-provoking knowledge to start these pertinent conversations within your organization.
