May 7th, 2021: “Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4M ransom one day after hack.”
June 9th, 2021: “Meat supplier JBS paid $11 million to its ransomware attackers.”
All the “big” ones make the news. What you do not hear about are the attacks and ransoms being paid by small businesses every day. Doctor’s offices, CPAs, law firms, distributors, towns, cities, even police departments and DA’s offices!
What’s going on? JBS spends $200 million on IT annually and employs 850 tech specialists. If they cannot protect themselves, how in the world can a small business do it on a “shoestring” IT budget?
In a single word: APATHY
Apathy: noun. Lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.
We hear these statements all the time. Are you guilty of saying any of them?
• “We are too small; hackers don’t care about our business.”
• “We have nothing of value on our computers.”
• “We have backups, so we’re not concerned.”
Here is how I can prove to you that you should care and you need to do something today to protect your business. Try this simple experiment. Seriously.
Do NOT use your company computers for one day. No Internet, no applications, no email. Nothing. Can you survive? What would your business look like when you can’t look anything up or help any customers?
Now extend that to 19 days! That’s the average downtime after a ransomware attack. Yes, almost 3 weeks to recover. I am not kidding – that’s the average! (safeatlast.co/blog/ransomware-statistics/)
So, take the time to meet with your IT professional and put together a disaster recovery plan. Put together an Incident Response Plan, get a cyber-liability insurance policy, and do some testing. I am sure your current backups are no longer adequate – we see it all the time! Call us today, you just might thank me later!