The Expert Podcast

For those of us in the cyber security industry, a troubling trend for cyber attacks is being projected. The estimated cost for cyber crime in the next five years is supposed to almost triple. If you look at 2022, it was 8.4 trillion, and by 2027, just five years away, you're talking almost 24 trillion dollars. That's a huge increase over a five-year period. If you go back five years, it was barely even a trillion dollars. The amount of cyber liability, cyber crime, and damages is going to go through the roof.

If you're a small business or a medium-sized business, you want to make sure you have your ducks in a row. This means having a cyber defense plan, a cyber insurance policy, best practices in your normal everyday operations, and also don't forget your suppliers and customers. Your suppliers and customers interact with you on an everyday basis. They might connect with your inventory programs, your CRMs, or there may be connections with your different apps. All of those are vectors for attacks on your business.

It may not be that your customer or your supplier is a hacker or a nefarious actor, but if they get hacked or compromised, it can intrude into your organization as well. Your billing, accounts payable, and accounts receivable are all other sources. Keep track of all your devices. Think about all these computers that you see behind me; every one of them is connected to the internet. If one of those gets attacked and successfully taken over, now it's inside your organization. It's like a virus getting into your company.

Make sure that all of your devices, even hidden devices like televisions, hotspots, maybe things like routers or modems, and some of your smart devices in your operation, may also connect to the internet. So, make sure you have a very good inventory and census of all these devices. Have a good cyber defense plan. You can get good advice from cyber insurance companies because they see the damage that happens every day, and they know how to prevent it.

But look, whatever risk you thought you had five years ago—maybe we'll call it a risk of one—now it's going to be a risk of 24 times that value five years from now. So act accordingly and don't be a victim where your business is shut down for days, weeks, or months while you're putting all your computers, networks, inventory, and customer base back together.