Remember when you were a child riding in your parents’ car and being bored? Then all of a sudden, your sibling or friend said, “I Spy something…”, and you had to guess what the other person saw. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes you couldn’t guess it if your life depended on it. What also made it harder was your sibling or friend would lie and change what they originally first saw because you got it right away. Imagine those two kids are now grown up and are sitting in a dark room in another country saying, “Hey Bobby, I Spy…”, while they’re watching you process a payment, entering customer information, or even watching you type, that’s when the fun is over and game becomes real.

This is called “Hacking”, and Cybersecurity is the safeguarding of the confidentiality of your business, your clients’ information, and even your brand. The implementation of best practices, technology, risk management, and training at your company is designed to protect networks, devices, programs, and data from attacks or unauthorized access. A hack can impact your company financially due to non-compliance with data protection regulations.

There are four main areas of concern with most being preventable:
• Ransomware, is a type of malware that involves an attacker locking the victim's computer system files.
• Malware is any file or program used to harm a computer user.
• Social engineering is an attack that relies on human interaction to trick users.
• Phishing is a form of fraud where fraudulent emails are sent that resemble emails from reputable sources; however, the intention of these emails is to steal sensitive data, such as credit card or login information.

Lesson learned too late…. Recently we’ve seen a 20-year, 16 employee, two generation local family company go out of business after not installing a recommended $365.00 business firewall solution. Why did the company go out of business? They were hacked but by then it was too late. Having insurance wasn’t the issue, they had that, it was their reputation that was lost. The brand they spent 20 years building was irreversibly damaged forever with one preventable hack, therefore you shouldn’t take Cybersecurity lightly.

If you would like to learn more about how to protect your company, you can e-mail us at info@efftechnologies.com , or call us anytime at 440-388-4100, to setup a meeting as we would love to help you protect your business and customers.