In the bible’s Old Testament, a famous battle had destroyed the wall around Jerusalem. Years later, the wall still sat, destroyed and useless. The entire city was in ruins. A young servant named Nehemiah observed the problem and convinced the King he could rebuild the wall. The King agreed and sent him to the city to get started. In a short time, the wall was completely rebuilt, and the city was safe again. Do you know what happened?
Nehemiah motivated the people who lived near the wall to fix just the part of the wall that was adjacent to their own homes. The big problem then became a small problem for lots and lots of people. The wall was rebuilt.
Today, we face a similar challenge with our cybersecurity defenses. Cyberthieves have realized that stealing from smaller businesses is much easier than from larger corporations, and just as profitable. We must come together to protect our businesses from cyberthieves that threaten to take our data, destroy our businesses, and steal our privacy. This modern problem might be able to be solved just as Nehemiah solved his problem so many years ago.
Today, I am sharing a plan to help each business repair the wall near their home so that we can better protect the entire community.
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Educate Business Leaders and Staff Members: Executives in small to midsized businesses must learn about cybercriminals, cyberthreats, and their own cyberweaknesses. Business leaders must understand cybersecurity options and the risks involved if the situation is ignored. Every employee must understand the importance of cybersecurity, what is at stake, how to identify something malicious, and how to report a problem. That only happens with proper training for the staff and constant vigilance when performing even mundane tasks like reading email.
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Protect Your Own Business: Business leaders need to fortify existing defenses such as the firewall, antivirus, and business continuity (backup) system with newer and more modern tools to prevent successful attacks from the cyberthieves. A well-executed cybersecurity plan is built on layers of defenses that protect businesses in multiple ways. It is no longer acceptable to rely simply on a firewall and antivirus to protect your business from the bad guys.
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Develop an Incident Response Plan: If you are attacked, your employees need to know what to expect and what to do. An Incident Response Plan identifies what must be protected, what defines a breach, and what procedures to follow after a breach occurs. A proper plan identifies decision makers, prompts for key players’ input (such as the cyberliability insurance broker), and creates a step-by-step procedure so that nothing gets missed.
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Pursue Attackers Aggressively: Your cyberliability insurance agent, your IT department or vendor, and your management team must work together to pursue the cyberthieves by notifying state and federal authorities or the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Many times, the cyberinsurance broker will take the lead and handle reporting the breach to the appropriate parties, but we all need to do our part to begin chasing down the criminals and hopefully, one day, holding some of them accountable for their actions. Examples of organizations involved in that part would likely be the cybercrime unit of the FBI, the IC3, and local authorities such as the State Attorney General’s office.
Together, we are helping to build a new wall around all small businesses by making it more difficult and less profitable for cyberthieves to attack you. We need you to focus on rebuilding or fortifying the wall near your business as the people of Jerusalem did back in Nehemiah’s time. The ultimate desired result of you preparing YOUR staff, YOUR management team, and YOUR network to better defend against cybercrime hopefully will be that the cyberthieves become more and more discouraged at launching unsuccessful attacks against small businesses.
We are calling on each business in Delaware to fight with us by fixing your own section of the “wall”. Let’s all try to stop these cyberthieves together!
By Rich Kenney