Contact Us On
Quite a number of years ago, I fell victim to a hacker/cybercriminal breaking into a large well-known website by breaching my very overused password. A short time later I was targeted by the same person with scam emails that baited me with a lure of a “free gift”, I fell for it...This led to me learning some very important lessons.
Thankfully, I got off lightly, considering the extent of the hacking, I am very fortunate that more damage wasn’t done. It is interesting reflecting on the situation, how as humans we fall into the pattern of our lazy tendencies being on autopilot, this putting us at risk of falling victim to cyber-crime. No matter how technology literate we may be, we can fall victim to cyber-crime, often without knowledge or involvement.
I have learnt some very important lessons from the incidents I have experienced and from this have implemented crucial steps to move forward. I firmly believe these situations have been what has led me down the path I find myself on today, wanting to protect as many people as possible from hackers and cybercriminals.
With our experience in protecting professional services, firm equity principals, partners and directors, as well as their teams, I assure you, here at My Info Tech Partner we can make an impact in protecting you and your team. It goes without saying, the impact stretches beyond just yourself and your team but to your clients as well as their team.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Naturally, I want to ensure you do not make the mistakes I did. As the late great Jim Rohn said “It's important to learn from your mistakes, but it is BETTER to learn from other people's mistakes, and it is BEST to learn from other people's successes. It accelerates your own success”.
I want to share with you the successes that my team experience so we can help you, to ensure you never fall victim to hackers and cybercriminals.
According to Deloitte, 90% of the total cyberattack costs occur beneath the surface and business recovery from a cyber-attack can stretch out up to 5 years post the incident.
A few of the beneath the surface costs you can expect after a cyber-attack are;
- Insurance premium increases.
- Increased cost to raise debt.
- Inability to operate and service clients as well as obtain new ones.
- Devaluation in your trade name.
- Loss of intellectual property.
- Loss of customers or clients.
According to the IBM & Ponemon Cost Of A Data Breach Report 2020, the average value of lost business in 2020 was $1,520,000. On average it was taking 207 days to identify the breach, and 73 days to contain the breach.
Ask yourself this.
- Do you have a spare $1,520,000 to just light on fire when you suffer a cyber-attack?
- Are you a larger organisation? Many have faced losses of over $4,400,000. Can you afford to light that amount of money on fire?
- Do you think you’d be one of the 60% of small business that are unable to recover and are forced to close their doors?
- Would you and your business survive?
- How would you be feeling then?
According to Cybint solutions, 95% of all cyber security breaches are due to human error. Personally, that number is closer to 100%, but I digress.
You may be thinking… So what? What does this have to do with my professional services firm and why should I care? “I’ll just go start another firm or buy into another one and leave the one I’m currently with". Naturally, this may be more difficult if you or the firm have no cashflow, and the other firm equity principals, partners and directors, can’t afford to buy your shares in the firm.
There are a number of very important lesson I have learnt that everyone needs to implement to protect themselves and businesses, I will list a few;
- Ensuring your employees and or team are aware of the warning signs especially with scam or malicious emails, text messages or contact us messages.
- Ongoing cyber security awareness training and ongoing phishing testing.
- Organisation management, to lead by example, when it comes to matters, relating to IT and cyber security.
- Working with a specialist IT services company, with extensive cyber security experience, on an ongoing monthly basis, who can immediately assist in preventing, or at a minimum, mitigating the damage caused when something like this happens.
- Having multiple layers of cyber security protecting your professional services firm or organisation addressing 3 key areas.
- Ensuring your specialist IT services company leads by example and practice's what they preach, or “Eats their own dog food” as a mentor of mine likes to say.
So how do you avoid the stress, anguish, sleepless nights, ruined reputation, monetary losses and time losses as well as accelerate your own success?
Obviously, you want to work with an IT Services company with extensive cyber security experience that implements on going cyber security services to monitor the security of your professional services firm’s IT systems 24/7, 365 days of the year.
There must be a multi layered security approach across all your IT systems either in house, in the cloud or a hybrid system. The services must have guaranteed response times and you must know how long the data is going to be retained for.
While you have no direct control of anyone else’s cyber security controls and mechanisms, you can control and protect yourself and your organisation. This will in turn inspire others to have, ongoing 24/7, 365 days external security monitoring of their systems. Ensuring you have this protection allows us to keep you’re and your business safe, we are able to detect when something has happened, even if a cyber-criminal or hacker has tried, or succeeded, to delete the evidence of it occurring from your systems. Naturally, you also need to address the human element with ongoing cyber security awareness training and phishing testing.
If you’re an IT Leader for your organisation or perhaps you’re the managing partner/director for your firm, and have an internal IT team, consider getting the help you and your team need, to protect yourselves better. To learn more on how we can help, check out our co-managed IT services.
Have questions and want to learn more? Go to https://www.myinfotechpartner.
