The Expert Podcast

Even government agencies are getting cyberattacks. Here's an example where a county in New York had their real estate records and their clerk's office attacked by a hacker. It deleted files, deleted records, and held them hostage. But if you notice in the article description, the cyber attack was from a third-party records management vendor.

So, this is where a lot of cyber attacks happen—your computer system. Whether you're a government agency or a private sector company, you have connections to many other organizations. You have connections to vendors and to CRM providers, maybe like Salesforce, Google, or Amazon.

You probably have connections to customer or client systems to exchange information, and any one of those could be a method by which a hacker could get into your system. Even if you have the best protections on your system, if one of your vendors, clients, customers, or providers has a vulnerability and the hacker gets in there, they may use that to jump into yours.

This is where third-party protection is extremely important, whether it's through your insurance company, your cyber insurer, or a cyber defense system. The third party is vulnerable because you trust and give access to third parties all the time on a daily basis.

And if that third party isn't secure, which you'll never know, you might have a vulnerability yourself by proxy. This is an example of a of a government agency; their county clerk was basically shut down because of a hack, and it didn't go directly to the government; it came through a third party.

So be aware of what connections you have and what the best practices are to prevent that from happening in your business.