Earlier this week, Kurtis Minder, CEO at GroupSense, joined Defendify's Cyber Crystal Ball panel with Lori Sussman, Professor at University of Southern Maine and Antoinette King, Founder at Credo Cyber Consulting.
On the panel, they discussed:
Below are a few highlights from the panel discussion:
The craziest 2021 moment for Kurtis was the number of small businesses that got hit that no one heard about. "For every Colonial Pipeline you hear about in the news, there are 100 small businesses that are hit by ransomware. It is the thing that no one talks about. It is life changing for small businesses." Small businesses are impacted on a greater scale than large enterprises - and it is happening more frequently. The likelihood that a small business owner knows someone that was hit by a ransomware incident is high.
Ransomware was everywhere in the news during 2021. Lori Sussman brought up a scary statistic, "40% of people don’t change passwords on their home networks." With the rise in home offices it increases your organization's attack surface. Even organizations that implement VPNs, are vulnerable. An employee is likely to turn off their VPN when when they experience issues with slow internet speeds. According to Lori, "we need to make sure things work better with VPNs."
Kurtis made the observation that with work from home. "In a traditional office space you don't have to worry about who overhears you. Work from home has brought in a new level of vulnerabilities that aren't being talked about. If you are at home or in a hotel, you don’t know who’s overhearing you, which could be a security violation."
Due to increased ransomware cases, cyber insurance is becoming more popular. If you have a policy the insurance company might dictate how you respond. You need to understand that in advance of an incident. "Please don't wait until after you have been attacked to read the fine print on your insurance policy. Know what you need to do and who you need to contact," says Kurtis..
What are we going to see in 2022? According to Kurtis, "the multi-factor authentication market is going make a big leap this year. Those type of companies are valuing high right now. Also, I predict that the metaverse is going to make headlines. Some of the cyber-criminal activities have moved into the metaverse, which is harder to crack. There is a huge opportunity for fraud. We are going to see a lot of bad activity around the metaverse."
At the end of the day, know that you can make a difference. Volunteer and help out your community. Good cyber hygiene at a small business is good patriotism. Small business makes up half the economy and half the jobs. We need to solve that gap. We need to step up as cyber professionals to educate the small businesses.
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