With so much emphasis behind sharing personal information online for the sake of presenting our best digital selves, we seldom consider the various cyber threats that exist and the propensity by which they can pose serious risk.
The emphasis on living carefree and posting ad nauseam online can come at a significant cost. It’s not all fun and games when it comes to preserving your sensitive information while casually browsing the internet.
Agreeing to the usual Terms of Service (TOS) of a given website, app or social media platform often gets glossed over before vulnerable users click “accept”, or worse still, find themselves downloading the latest freeware or files from less than credible websites.
Do Your Threat Assessment
At the forefront of cyber attacks, that include everything from phishing and e-mail scams to trackers and malware, it’s important to consider if investing in cyber insurance is appropriate for you and whether the ends do justify the means.
Cyber security insurance primarily helps guard businesses from computer-related crimes, losses and scams. For a nominal fee, there are a number of services that provide real-time protection so that companies big or small can continue to conduct business with fewer worry.
While it is true that there are a number of online threats that affect your everyday user, businesses tend to be the bigger targets. A common cyber attack against them usually comes in the form of ransomware and makes companies panic as they run the risk of losing their sensitive information while unwittingly spamming their clients.
Small Businesses Are a Fat Target
Small businesses are particularly vulnerable since they often refrain from allocating a portion of their budget towards the prevention of cyber security threats, according to DataStream Cyber Insurance, a company that advises businesses to prevent attacks before they can occur.
“Threat actors often look for the low hanging fruit,” DataStream cautions, “To them, no business is too small. All businesses hold sensitive data from customers and employees including credit card info, e-mail addresses, Social Security Numbers, driver’s license info, even competitive info and trade secrets.”
In a report conducted by Forbes Magazine, 61 percent of all server message block protocols (SMB) have reported at least one cyber attack since last year, which is alarming, considering that SMBs can also impact company-wide communications.
Better Safe Than Sorry
SMB protocol is designed for sharing information and granting access to known users, which allows them
an entry point to serial ports, files and a host of resources that reside on their shared networks that can sometimes become virtual playgrounds for hackers.
David Seidman has spent over 13 years as a cyber security expert and is currently the head of detection and response platform for Robinhood. He has advised companies like Google and Microsoft in assessing and preventing cyber attacks.
Seidman recognizes the faults in company-wide security that guards against hackers who often used advanced methods to dupe vulnerable businesses.
“It takes a good team to set up the right alarms that catch a real attack but don’t trigger too often when no attack happened,” Seidman writes. “Catching this level of attacker is very feasible, but not cheap. These attackers tend to be commercially motivated, looking to steal credit cards, passwords and other monetizable data.”
