You are not Colonial Pipeline, and that should scare you.
You've probably heard about the recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, a huge pipeline operator. According to the company, Colonial handles 45% of the East Cost's fuel delivery. 5500 miles of their network was shut down because of the attack. The company ultimately paid about $5 million to the cyber criminals in order to restore their systems. The president was made aware of this situation, and offered the governments resources to help. Colonial was given unlimited funding to solve the problem.
Even with all these resources it STILL took them 5 days to get online, and there are STILL intermittent service interruptions to this day.
Joseph Blount, the Colonial Pipeline CEO, said the cyberattack would ultimately cost the company tens of millions of dollars.
Though the pipeline’s flow of fuel has returned to normal, the impact of the hack hardly ended with the ransom payment. It will take months of restoration work to recover some business systems, and will ultimately cost Colonial more than they ever imagined.
Why should this be important to small business owners? Because your business is likely not a massive nationally known pipeline with funds and resources to deal with a breach. Also, the government most likely will not show up to save you. And you cannot assume that you'll "only" be down for 5 days.
Breaches are even more detrimental to smaller companies, and some may not recover at all. These cyber criminals can get away with attacking small businesses because they know they are likely not prepared.
So what can we learn from this? A little prevention is worth so much more than a lot of recovery. Preventing a ransomware attack is far less expensive (even if it means deploying tools, systems, and policies that seem costly and time consuming) than having to recover from an actual breach. This may look like security awareness training, multi-factor authentication, business continuity/backup systems, and more.
To get a free quote and get started protecting your business now, click here.
