No one wants to hear that their online credentials have been compromised. It can be particularly sensitive for security professionals. They are supposed to be the ones who know what they are doing. They are the ones who are most capable of keeping that sort of thing from happening to them. And if something like that does happen to them, they can suffer damage to their professional reputation and business. Even if the security compromise doesn’t lead to a loss of personal data, it could still lead to a loss of money in other ways.
When companies get hacked, it can cost millions. When it is a small business, it can still run into the thousands to get things up and running again in a secure way. The cost of being hacked is seldom in the budget. This is where having a Western Shamrock type of lender on speed dial can really come in handy. This is the kind of company that can get you the money you need faster than you think and will have a variety of offerings that can fit your specific needs. Once you have cleared the immediate crisis, learn the lessons of other professionals who were compromised by implementing the following strategies:
Diversify Your Holdings
If all of your crypto was in Solana, I have some bad news: They were breached to the tune of $8M from 7,000 hacked wallets. If your wallet was among them, then it is probably too late to implement the move to a cold wallet. A common mistake made by amateurs and professionals alike is to put all of their eggs into one speculative basket. That is not a particularly good move.
Make sure you diversify everything that has to do with your holdings. Diversify your investment strategy. Diversify your banking strategy. And when it comes to sensitive client information, don’t keep everything in one place that could be compromised. Nothing online is so secure that you should trust it with everything. This is especially true with crypto as it is unregulated, uninsured, and as we have learned the hard way, unpredictable. Be sure to limit your risks and that of your clients.
Backup Strategy
Don’t end the day without implementing some kind of backup strategy. Secure, online backup is affordable enough for everyone. Every small business should have some type of off-site backup. The reason backup is so important for businesses is that it is the easiest way to defeat ransomware attacks.
Ransomware is not about stealing your data. It is about encrypting it and locking you out of your own data. Once done, you have to pay the ransom to regain access to your data. It is not a particularly good scheme except for the fact that it has proven to be extremely successful against institutions with fully staffed IT departments.
The kryptonite for ransomware is a good backup. If these organizations can just reinstall a fresh copy of the OS and restore from a good backup, they could get on with their business. This is especially true for consumers. A lot of the companies and institutions being targeted are ones with older Windows PC hardware that is not capable of running the latest system. There is only so much you can do to secure those machines. The attacks against them are quite mature and sophisticated. If your best efforts fail, be sure to have good backups so that you never have to pay the ransom.
Anti-Phishing Countermeasures
What are you actually doing in your company to reduce the chances of phishing attacks? This is the primary vector for ransomware and other weaponized payloads. As a company, one of the best things you can do is stop sending out emails to your employees with links. You cannot teach workers to stop opening links in emails and messages if you are requiring them to do that for the emails and messages you are sending them.
You also need to regularly audit your outside vendors. These attacks often come through a third party that was hacked. If you can’t make your team accountable for security lapses, you just as well hand over your business to the thieves now and save everyone a lot of trouble.
Even the pros get hacked. Learn from their mistakes by diversifying, backing up, and deploying measures to reduce phishing exploits.
