Small businesses are considered a rich targets for cybercrime today. James Morrison, a Houston FBI Computer Scientist, speaking about Cybersecurity at the West Houston Chamber Cybersecurity event on August 2nd framed the danger to businesses today.
Morrison stated, “The mindset of the cyber criminals is different than normally think. It is not what they can steal from you, but it is what so important to you, that you will pay them to get it back. 1.5 trillion dollars of cybercrime, which is underreported. Morrison believes that cybercrime is the greatest challenge to the US economy in the next decade.
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“The cyber criminals do not care what you have, it is about what will you pay to get it back?”
According to SCORE 43% of the cybercrime attacks target the small businesses.
Morrison continues, “Now you don’t have to be a programmer now to launch ransomware attacks and that the cybercrime gains are so great with so little investment.
With ransomware being easily deployed by using a ransomware deployment software on the Dark Net along with the purchase of 100,000 emails for around $100, a cyber criminal could get an estimated 1% of the 100k emails which is 1,000 users to click on their malicious load. This would yield close to $240,000 at $240 per ransom victim.”
“8 states right now have privacy laws and if you lose someone’s data, you are going to get sued…”
Morrison adds, “You should be using cybersecurity technology if you are a company because 8 states right now have privacy laws that if you lose someone’s data, you are going to get sued. What are you going to do when you lose that data? You will find out real quick when they fine you up to 6 to 10% of your gross revenue. That’s the picture.”
Cyber attacks are exponentially growing each year. Here are just a few of the recent cyberattack statistics:
1. 1.16 billion email addresses and passwords were exposed from multiple sources and discovered in 2019 in a massive breach called “Collection 1.” This load of information is thought to be the largest breach in history to date, according to an article by Fortune.
2. According to the Symantec’s 2019 Internet Security Threat Report, 48% of the malicous email attachments are Office files.
3. Symantec’s 2019 ISTR also reported that routers and connected cameras account for 75% and 15% of infected devices in IoT attacks respectively.
4. Ransomware attacks occur every 14 seconds The frequency in which Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that a business will fall victim to a ransomware attack this year in its 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report (ACR).
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