Every day I meet successful business owners whose responsibility is to lead their business to a profitable bottom line each year.
They create their yearly goals with business plans, check their cashflow with forecast budgets and engage talented staff to deliver the product or service.
Yet in cyber security the human factor is the greatest vulnerability for any business large or small and largely is ignored by business owners.
Why?
Because most business owners don’t believe it will ever happen to them and mistakenly believe it is someone else’s problem-most commonly the IT team member
In my time as an IT Security Specialist I am often gobsmacked at the comments I hear whenever I am presenting to small business owners such as:
“Why would a hacker want my data? I’m just a one-man band”, or “We’re fine I have an IT guy who assures me we are protected”
In a recent article ‘The Human Factor in IT Security: How employees are Making Businesses Vulnerable from Within’, …
the WannaCry Ransomware attack was cited as the biggest example of how the human factor was a contributing factor to one of the biggest data breaches in the world
For those who aren’t familiar with what happened, in May 2017 the WannaCry ransomware that for 4 days worldwide saw 200,000 victims and over 300,000 computers infected was largely due to the human factor of laziness of not updating the systems designed by Microsoft who was aware of a potential threat of exploit to Windows older versions.
“Several cases followed — with non-IT personnel being the weakest link: for example, employees with local administrator rights who disabled security solutions on their computers and let the infection spread from their computer onto the entire corporate network.”
Source:
In 2017 the Kaspersky Lab and B2B international undertook a study into over 5000 businesses around the globe.
The results were astounding with over 55% businesses believing that lack of knowledge or carelessness was the main reason the business was at risk was due to the lack of adequate training of staff.
Now take this statistic back to your own business.
As you are ultimately responsible for the IT security in your business (not your IT guy) how cyber ready are you and your staff?
We are holding the 2019 Cynosura Cyber Security Summit for Lawyers and Accountants on 24th May 2019 at the Metropolitan Hotel called
The three key strategies to build your defence plan to protect your business from a Cyber Attack.
Once again, I appreciate this opportunity to work with you to keep your business safe
Gary Lowe
IT Security Specialist
To read more on the results of the Kaspersky Lab survey click here: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/the-human-factor-in-it-security/
