Can Your Business Survive a Cyber Attack?

CAN YOUR BUSINESS SURVIVE A CYBER ATTACK?

It's a Wednesday afternoon and business is as usual. Suddenly one computer user says they can not get anywhere and their cursor is spinning. Then another, and another and soon you have an entire office at a stand still. They can not click on anything and they can do anything. You call your IT group saying you have a problem and within a few hours they are on site. The whole network is down and there is no sign as to why. After troubleshooting and hours of diagnosis the verdict is in. You were attacked! It is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack which crippled your network. A crew works overnight to figure out where it coming from and put an end to it. You just spent thousands of dollars and wasted hours of time.

Is this something your business can afford? I saw this scenario play out with a client of mine (they had a different IT group at the time but were looking for some help from me). The figure was around $3000 per hour  and that included off hours because they sold product online. They were down a total of 16 hours. They lost untold customers in a very competitive market. It took them over a week to recover inventory services and get back to where they were full strength. It was estimated in the $100,000 range in loss. It took them months to recover financially and almost didn't make it back.

The reason why this happened or was done was never discovered like many other cases. Many times the business worries about the why afterward instead of during. They just want their business back. More and more these kind of attacks are being done for extortion or as one business vs another. 

Most small businesses I run into have a very inexpensive router so things like logging all of the activity is not set up and many of the inexpensive routers are fairly easy to compromise. Higher end equipment will tell you what is going on when and can detect problems when they happen instead of finding out when users can not get to the Internet or network.

Cyber attacks continue to mount. It is not just the Home Depots of the world getting hit. I have seen industry numbers as high as 75% of small businesses being affected by attacks. Major attacks cause somewhere in the range of 60% of businesses failing.

Bottom line is no matter what size the business it is time to shore up your security efforts. Yes it is more capital you need to invest in equipment but you also need to invest time in training employees on safe practices. I know this is costly but so is losing your business!!