Security Nightmares

You have a list of 100 priorities, and somehow security never seems to be at the top. I get it. You’re busy. Maybe you have people on your team who worry about security for you. Maybe you’re a small business without the budget for dedicated staff. Either way, every day you take the gamble that the resources you’ve assigned to keep your system secure are enough to overpower whoever might try to get in. Every day you roll the dice, and you probably don’t even think about what will happen if you lose. This is the mentality that leaves so many businesses vulnerable to attacks like WannaCry, and it’s the reason the bad guys normally come out on top.

If you haven’t thought through the ramifications of a firewall breach for your organization, let’s walk through the logistics together now. Let’s pretend you’re the General Manager of the Honda manufacturing plant in Sayama, a factory that was recently shut down after a resurgence of WannaCry within their facility. The factory was only shut down for one day, but the result was 1,000 cars that didn’t get made. And far worse than any production implications, the breach means that any data contained within the facility is now potentially leaked.

Imagine you are the General Manager on that fateful day. You haven’t been involved with your IT department in months, so you probably didn’t even know there was a new threat. You call in your tech lead to explain the situation and he assures you that measures were taken to address the WannaCry threat when it first appeared. With limited manpower and budget, he says his team did the best they could do but it wasn’t enough. Now you have to explain to your District Manager that the plant will be non-operational that day. Everyone who has come into work will be sent home, except the tech team, who will be supported by security experts brought in on urgent notice and paid exorbitantly for their trouble. You’ll work with your comptroller to calculate the costs and the lost revenue. Will it be in the tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

And that’s not all. Now you have to explain to your employees that their confidential information has been leaked. You have to bring in lawyers to evaluate your liability in failing to secure the data. You have to reach out to everyone who has had any contact with anyone on your system to inform them of the threat that you may or may not have exposed them to. Where would you even begin? Better call those tech experts back in and get the checkbook ready.

A security compromise is incredibly damaging and costly even to large corporations that have the resources to weather the storm. But medium size businesses, with their small or nonexistent IT departments and minimal tech budgets, have even more to lose.

With network invasion, as with home invasion, it’s much easier to take preventative measures than it is to deal with the situation after the fact. If you have an alarm system but you don’t have a secure and managed gateway, you’re letting yourself be blind to the larger risk. BitFlip Labs can help by giving you access to a team of experts at an affordable price. And if you’re secure, everyone you do business with will be a little more secure too.