The Expert Podcast

So, what should business owners do in the face of all these new cyber attacks, even if they haven't affected your industry or your business yet? Here's a great article about what to do afterwards from somebody who's been through it. That's the automobile industry—you've probably heard a lot in the last week or two about the big CDX (CDK) attacks that affected 15,000 car dealerships around the country. It's a good hindsight where you can learn from somebody else's problems.

Now, dealerships are looking back and saying, "Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I wish I did something different in advance of this to keep this from happening to me." Many of these car dealerships have been out of business for a week or more. They can't sell cars, service cars, sell parts, take trade-ins, or even title or register cars because all their computer systems are shut down.

How much do you think a car dealership loses on not being able to sell cars for a week? If you sell five cars a day at, let's say, cars now cost $40,000, that's a quarter-million dollars a day. In a week, you could be $2 million in sales just like that. In a week, right? Service and parts and everything else, so one week could be very expensive for these dealerships. They still have to make payroll, pay their rent, pay all their expenses, their advertising.

So, what are these dealerships saying now, after the fact? Here's a great article from Automotive News saying, "Time to go on offense against cyber criminals. Being a victim shouldn't be the cost of doing business."

So, what do you do? Step number one is have active monitoring. If you are a business, even if you don't think you're in the tech business and are at risk, we saw an article yesterday about builders who may be at risk of cyber attacks. You should have active monitoring. Couple ways to get that—you could hire a cybersecurity company that just puts a little code on your computers that monitors for hacks. Or you can get it through a cyber insurance policy. Most cyber insurance companies—they want to help you monitor because they don't want to have a claim that they have to pay, so they're going to help catch it early.

Most of these attacks are you will be back in your video in just a few seconds. In the meantime, remember that ActualHuman.com offers you live one-on-one private video consultation with an expert in this exact subject. We want to listen to your story, we want to hear your questions, we want to give you expert advisement of your options and tell you what we know about your particular situation. Now back to your video, or something that takes weeks or months to put together the hacker will infiltrate your system, put little monitoring codes on your platform, and watch your emails, listen to your messages, download all your passwords, and then they'll attack. After a few weeks of gathering information, if you catch it early before they actually launch the attack, you can eliminate the cost of this, the damages.

Here's another reason why you might want to prevent it. In addition to those losses, there's already lawsuits. What are the lawsuits about? Well, a dealership has already been sued by a customer and an employee because the customer says, "My information was put out there in the dark web," and the dealership employee—it was even a former employee saying, "My payroll records at that dealership were now compromised." You may have third parties that have damages that could sue you as a business.

So, you want to make sure that if you're getting cyber liability insurance, you ask your broker to see if it covers third parties. The third parties could be customers; could also be vendors. If you have a vendor that you buy materials from and you order products and order parts every week, if you're hacked and you can't pay that vendor, you have to cancel a contract. They could also have a claim against you for losses.

So, make sure you understand the domino effect of what these hacks can do to you as a business, and see what kind of protection you can put in place to keep it from happening. The probability of one of these cyber attacks happening to your business is much higher than other types of perils like fire or, you know, damage to your business from somebody crashing into it, you know, in a car coming off the road. A cyber attack is more likely. It also can do more damage and put you out of business for years.

Think about it—if your building burns down tomorrow, God forbid, how soon could you be back in business? Well, you could rent some space down the street, buy some cheap desks, go to Walmart, and buy some computers and somehow put together a skeleton crew within a day or two. A cyber attack—if all your computers are shut down, even if your building is fine, your employees are fine, you may not be able to be in business until that hacker turns you back on, and that could be weeks, if ever.

Keep those risks in mind. If you have questions, you can reach our website. We're glad to be of assistance. Thank you for watching. Remember, you can access live one-on-one personal consultations with a licensed private investigator, a licensed commercial insurance broker, a licensed certified real estate title examiner, also a certified civil court mediator. So, if you have a need to talk to an expert in any of these fields or even a licensed building general contractor, you can click the link below, ActualHuman.com, and arrange a live one-on-one undivided attention with a licensed expert where you can ask any questions, get information about your situation, and we'd be glad to help.