Let’s see we have had 2 catastrophic Hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit the US Mainland with devastating results, leaving nearly $300B worth of damage in its wake, plus losing countless lives in the Caribbean and US, most likely the most costly month in terms of losses in history. Plus as I write this blog, we have Hurricane Jose shifting worse than a drunken sailor, going here, going there, reversing its path worse than a politician and will likely head up the coast and cause issues in the Northeast. Then lingering in the tropics we have Tropical Storm that was just upgraded to a Hurricane, Maria, hitting the Leeward Islands similar to what Irma did just over a week ago. For those of you who think, “Wow that’s enough weather for me to deal with”, there is Lee, who likely won’t impact our shores, but we can never be too safe nowadays.
If that wasn’t enough to scare us to turn our homes into shelters, we hear about Cyberterrorism virtually everyday with the largest breaches including HBO which has been held hostage by a group demanding about $6M in Ransomware, which HBO has declined so the Hackers released information about scripts for “Game of Thrones” along with highly confidential emails from executives, none of which portrayed HBO in a positive light. On top of this, a hospital in the Buffalo area, Erie County Medical Center, refused to pay a $30K Ransomware attempt, so instead they went to manual record keeping for 6 weeks and has since spent about $10M to fortify its network.
What is now being called the largest hack in recent history, is what occurred at Equifax, which they claim this impacted 143M Consumers which included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers. In addition, credit card numbers for approximately 209,000 U.S. consumers, and certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers, were accessed. The sad part is that we may never know the exact impact of this breach as our information is already floating around on the Internet so there is no exact way to pinpoint where this information came from. To find out if your information was exposed by this breach, you can go to https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/ to submit and see if your personal information may have been impacted like your’s truly was and received free credit reporting from Equifax.
To put this in a clearer light according to a recent USA Today article, “There’s been more than 825 million personal records exposed from data breaches in the 10-year period ending in 2016, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. More than 6,400 breaches occurred in that period. Last year there was a record 15.4 million U.S. victims of identity fraud, according to the 2017 Identity Fraud Study released by Javelin Strategy & Research. Losses attributed to identify theft totaled $16 billion in 2016, Javelin reported.”
By now you are asking why I’m bringing both of these topics up is due to the fact that I work for a Data Center, Host.net, whose role is to help companies manage their mission-critical data and have seen clients cascade upon us as Irma approached as well as when the Hurricane Warnings were lifted and continued to contact us about getting their infrastructure inside of our facilities, which in the grand scheme of things was the right thing to do. We have also seen companies contact us regarding Cybersecurity and what can be put in place to protect their data from the “Bad Guys”, who are out there snooping and trying to steal their data.
From my perspective, this seems to be a mostly reactionary response to what we are all seeing, reading or hearing on the Internet, Social Media or on Broadcast Media. My concern is that these conversations need to be held way in advance of an issue occurring and needs to be included in a well thought out Business Continuity Plan so that all incidents have sections in the plan that specify what action(s) need to be taken, who is the owner and what the next steps are. We have all heard the phase “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” more times than we care to admit and BCP or Disaster Recovery Plans are no exception.
These type of projects also need to start at the highest levels of any organization so that there is support down to operational levels with Key Stakeholders clearly identified and lines of communications are opened so entire teams can collaborate and create solutions that positively impact the company in case of an incident.
In summary if you are looking to protect your assets including your home, your business and your data/digital assets, we need to become much more proactive and not wait for incidents to occur. The “New Normal” says that we must be hyper-vigilant and keenly aware of our surroundings and if something doesn’t seem right in terms of interaction requests, then decline them to insure your safety.
For those organizations looking for help in either Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery or for solutions on Cybersecurity, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Glen@Host.net or via Twitter or Skype at @glenbenjamin. Thanks, Glen
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