The Expert Podcast

So how do cyber hackers work How does ransomware work How does cyber liability work Well You see these photos like in this article with the the hacker with the hoodie and he can't see his face and it's all lurking That's really not how hackers work anymore How cyber attackers work anymore It's an organized business for these individuals in these entities They have sales departments they have management they have offices They have a very well-funded Large operation If your company is looking to protect itself from cyber attacks Keep in mind that those who are looking to do you harm are just as organized as your company You have management meetings you have bonuses you have motivational procedures you have an employee manual These hackers have the same thing May not be as Formalized and maybe more distributed over a wider area But the hacking companies now are well-funded And they sometimes outsource work to other parties just like you would they have staff that look for opportunities just like you would Your cyber insurance company that you have your policy with We'll be keeping up to date On the current procedure used by cyber hackers and they will provide you with that information how to avoid that because every month every 90 days there are new methods used by the hackers To get into your company
They'll find the easiest way in even if it doesn't give them a lot of access to begin with For example if you have a receptionist that doesn't have logins to the server or admin or anything else but they do have an email address And they'll find a way to get into that receptionist email We even without their knowing maybe they send them a funny meme with a picture or they send them an email with an attached document and they open that Now they're able to Compromise that low-level employee the admin employee In their email And by having that email they might be able to send out an email to somebody else saying Hey by the way here's a document that you need And they can send that email to somebody higher up in the company Maybe your programmer maybe an it person maybe an executive Once it's into that system And what they do is they work their way up the food chain Once they're into the low level employee even we had one at a car dealership they got into one of the mechanics emails and had the mechanic then send an email to the service manager who sent it to the sales manager to the general manager And next thing they know they had a high level email Contact that had access to some pretty sensitive information customer information credit applications vendor information and the hackers were able to download all this and extract it but they call exfiltration From the server get it onto their system Once they had all the sensitive information then the hacker did ransomware where they locked down The server of this car dealership car dealership couldn't sell any cars They couldn't work on any cars They couldn't do anything Until they pay the ransom Or they restored their system Now most companies that do best practices have a backup of your system But that backup may be not be enough to restore the whole thing It might back up some of the data But you have more than data on your server You have programs apps software Documents Just because your customer data's backed up That's usually a convenience for you to Refill up your system but if your hard drive has been corrupted Your program that runs your operating system your program that runs your management system your Salesforce all those things might be deleted You might have to re-install every piece of software And then put the customer data back in There may be a lot of things that need to get installed that you may not have access to Your backup is probably only backing up data and records not the actual program files Some backups actually do a mirror take a S you know take an image of that A hard drive but even then sometimes the re-install Has problems because a serial number on one computer is different than another So there's a very specific way you want to do your backups The best way to do it is actually to keep a mirrored version of your server not do a backup but keep two copies that are equal and have one of them B firewalled from the web and firewalled from other computers So information only goes one way Again these are the best practices that your insurer not your agent or broker but the actual insurance company We'll tell you about sometimes they even require it before they even give you an insurance policy So make sure that just because you haven't been a victim of cyber crime or cyber attack You're aware of what the best practices are And you talk to your employees talk to your staff about what they should be doing and not doing If they get an email with an attached file If they get a strange contact Or if they get something through social media sometimes people will try to attack the company through LinkedIn They'll find out the corporate directory through LinkedIn and use that as a way to get an attack vector on your company Tell us what you think in the comments let us know how we can help