The Expert Podcast

…So how big of a problem is cyber crime If you run a small business, You may not have any exposure to any kind of cyber crime or cyber attacks or hacking or ransomware. But the size of that problem. Can be understood if you look at it in terms of compared to the U S market So in this article, it talks about the. $8 trillion cyber crime industry. Now if you take $8 trillion and compare it to other countries GDP, if it were measured as a country the cybercrime would be the world's third largest economy. after us and China. So it's a huge industry. This is happening all around us. It's affecting consumers individuals, big companies small companies public utilities, government agencies So where does this money come from How is it calculated? What are the costs of cyber crime? Well, it describes right here that the. Cost of cyber crime include damage and destruction of data stolen money. Lost productivity, theft of intellectual property. Theft of personal financial data And we'll talk about those. Separately. So imagine that you are a company and you're with an attack ransomware. some type of cyber attack… Many times what the hacker will do is infiltrate your system And we've talked before about how they do it and and mechanisms… And they will download all of your records Think about the records and information you have on your company system whether it's your server and the cloud your email your phone system. And they'll use that information First of all to try to extract a ransom from you to get it back or to unlock your system. In the meantime now they have your entire customer file. They may take that and sell it to your competitor. They may take it and sell your consumer customer list to the dark web.

So now you have a list of all your customers their addresses phone numbers emails, and sometimes even more sensitive information like date of birth or credit card numbers. And they'll sell it to, the dark web. Sometimes what they'll do is they'll lock up your accounts receivable. So you know, you have any given time a certain up. amount of counts receivable for some companies it's two months worth of, revenue. So if you have a net 30 or net 45 payment structure, by the time you get the billing out payment in you. have. Two months. Or maybe month and a half 10% of your company's revenue. At any given time is floating out there. And what they might do is they might send out alternate invoices with updated wire transfer information to your customers and said look, Here's your new payment information wire, the money to this address. And so now some percentage of your customers. We'll wire transfer their payments. To the hacker and you lose the money. Are you gonna tell your customer they have to pay twice or you going to eat the money? And for some companies losing 10% of the revenue. That might be all your profit for the year If you operate on a 10 or 15% profit margin, if you lose. a month or month and a half worth of payables, you may be losing all your profit for the year. Other times what they'll do is they will do embezzlement from you using your information for social engineering. They'll get your account information They'll get access to your email. They'll email your bank to transfer money to their account. Right So those are some of the losses. They'll do post attack disruption. So that way once they get access they can then continue to send emails on your behalf. To contact customers on your behalf to disrupt your business. You also have to spend money on forensic investigation You'll have to hire. usually investigator or. A forensic accountant to go back through and sort out all your records. Many time you will have to pay money to an it person to restore these records or to recreate the data Even if you have a backup. And last but not least you'll have reputational harm That means your customers your vendors your employees are all going to have some lack of confidence because this event happened in disrupted their lives Sometimes employees aren't able to get payroll, sometimes vendors aren't able to get paid Sometimes customers aren't able to place orders or get deliveries.

So this cyber crime. Is a huge thing And even though you may not have been exposed to it, It's a trick… That's a big number and it's the SA almost the size of the us market in terms of volumes So…look at the different options you have to prevent this whether it's cyber defense cyber insurance. Some type of best practices for, Hardening your network and make sure you're also including all of the nodes of your network that exists outside your four walls You may have servers routers VPNs that also have this type of vulnerability, even customer access to your network through their computers might be a vector for bad actors to get in.