Is Your Company Ready For a Cyber Attack?

• Crisis
• August 3, 2018
• by Sally Ann Rivera

A recent news story tells the tale of government workers in a small Alaskan town who became dependent upon typewriters to do their jobs after cyber criminals infected their computer systems with ransomware. How are your typewriter skills? Are your employees ready to do their jobs with pen and paper only? To avoid this plausible reality, it’s time for your business to prioritize cyber security.

Cyber-crime has become the latest petty theft (and also high-dollar heist). Many companies are starting to think about cyber defense plans and are taking proper preventative measures. The right preventative measures extend beyond adding security tools to your internal network to developing a new company culture that prioritizes communication.

We’ve worked with clients who had to pay in Bitcoin to recover their data, including a small healthcare client that lost access to electronic medical records amongst a staff never trained in updating charts by hand. The pattern of the latest wave of cyber threat? Hackers are targeting companies of all sizes. Whether you have a staff of two or two thousand, you need a crisis communication plan that includes a plan for handling cyber security incidents. And by “plan,” we mean more than a piece of paper drawn up on a typewriter.

A comprehensive and effective crisis plan is part of a culture change that begins with aligning your entire organization’s communication, training key executives and leaders and gathering the appropriate competitive material before cyber criminals infilitrate your system.