On Tuesday morning, a local accounting firm found itself unable to retrieve any of its client files. Every document, every tax return, every single piece of financial data from the past five years had been locked behind ransomware encryption. The attackers demanded $50,000 to unlock access.
Its owner later confessed something that is by now familiar: “We knew we should have paid more attention to IT security, but we thought we were too small to be targeted.”
The story repeats itself for companies of all sizes, across industries. And not because the owners are negligent or uneducated, but because IT risk behaves differently than other business risks. It’s invisible until it reaches catastrophic levels.
At ACT360, we notice that everybody does this all the time. Companies that wouldn’t think of conducting business without insurance or fire sprinklers will spend years running their most mission-critical systems on IT infrastructure held together with digital duct tape and a prayer.
The Warm Delusion of “It Won’t Happen to Us”
Many business owners think about risk in physical terms. They can spot a roof that leaks, feel when a staircase doesn’t seem safe, or hear when equipment begins to make odd noises. These dangers reveal themselves slowly and so allow you time to react.
IT risks are different. Your system can seem to be running perfectly fine until the minute it is fully breached.
Here are a few such scenarios that occurred to real businesses in the past year:
- The Well-Educated Hacker: A small manufacturing company’s servers went down late one Friday afternoon. Not a single backup had been checked in more than two years. After recovering systems the next Tuesday, they found that three months of production data had been corrupted. Total cost: $180,000 in lost work and data recovery.
- The Retail Store’s Customer Crisis: A small retail chain learned its point-of-sale system was breached for six months. Customer credit card data was being sold in darknet markets. The breach notification expenses alone totaled more than $75,000 (and that doesn’t include legal damages and loss of customer confidence).
- The Service Company’s Email Catastrophe: A consulting firm lost control of its email. Attackers sent highly realistic phishing emails to every customer they had (the kind of breach that can cost years’ worth of built-up trust). Three large clients canceled contracts in the span of a month.
None of these companies believed they were particularly high-risk targets.
Why Good Business Owners Make Poor IT Risk Choices
The real problem is not that business owners are reckless. It is that IT risk assessment demands a different kind of thinking than most other business decisions do.
Legacy corporate risk is quantifiable and predictable. You can watch inventory levels fluctuate, observe customer complaints rising high, or see your equipment wearing out. You get warning signs.
IT risks are invisible and immediate. Your network could be compromised for months, and you may never even notice. Your backup may fail quietly. Your security flaws do not, however, announce themselves until after they’re attacked.
This gives the mistaken feeling that it is safe. Everything seems to be going well, so IT risk goes down a peg on the list of priorities, behind more salient issues like sales, operations, or customer service.
The “We’re Too Small” Myth
Business owners often think cybercriminals are only after big companies. Not only is the assumption wrong, but it’s also dangerous.
Small and midsize companies make great targets for attackers, as they typically have:
- Fewer security resources
- Less sophisticated monitoring systems
- More outdated software
- Limited IT expertise
- Valuable data with weaker protection
Cybercriminals know this. They are employing automated tools to scour thousands of small business networks all at once, seeking low-hanging fruit to help them get in. Size is not immunity; it’s often exposure.
What Real IT Risk Looks Like
The majority of companies go about it backwards when it comes to IT risk. They sit back and wait for problems to develop and then react. Ignore a potential risk at your peril, because real risk assessment isn’t about crises in the making but managing threats before they actually explode.
Effective IT risk assessment examines:
- Your Data Reality: What data would mean the end of your business if it were wiped out? How much time could you spend without your systems? Where is this vital information housed, and who can have access to it?
- Your Vulnerability Points: What software has gone too long without an update? Who knows your systems’ administrative passwords? Are staff reusing a password on different accounts? How can you tell if somebody unauthorized is already in your network?
- Your Recovery Capabilities: Between you and your vendors, how soon could you realistically be back up and running if everything crashed today? How well have you actually tested your backups? Is contact information for mission-critical vendors recorded outside your primary systems?
- Your People Factor: Do teams know about phishing emails? Are they aware of the techniques used in social engineering? Are the logins of ex-employees removed in a timely manner?
The Real Cost of Waiting
When businesses put off IT risk assessment, they are not only gambling with the technical. They’re risking:
- Operational Halt: How long can your business function without computers, internet service, and access to customer data? For most, the answer is hours, not days.
- Monetary Recovery: In addition to recovery costs, take into account productivity loss, deadlines missed, contract cancellations, and regulatory fines. The average cost of a small business data breach is $200,000 to fix.
- Loss of Reputation: Customer trust cannot be easily restored when it is broken. Partners and vendors begin to doubt your dependability. New business is harder to win.
- Litigation: Depending on the industry, many businesses become ensnared in litigation and risk being heavily fined when they experience a data breach.
- Personal Stress: It is easy to overlook how an IT disaster affects people’s lives when you’re a business owner. The stress of rebuilding systems, managing crisis communications, and possibly losing the business takes a toll on family life and personal health.
Why We Have Antivirus, and Why That’s Not Enough
For far too many enterprises, their belief is that “simple antivirus” and maybe a firewall will be enough. It was a good strategy 15 years ago. In this day and age, the reality is that you need a layered security approach.
Modern businesses need:
- Frequent security reviews and penetration tests
- Current cyberthreats training for employees
- Tested backup and recovery procedures
- Network monitoring for suspicious activity
- Incident response planning
- Frequent updating with a patch management service
- Access control and user authentication mechanisms
It’s akin to building security. You wouldn’t secure your business with a lock on the front door alone. You’d employ a variety of layers: locks, alarms, cameras, lighting, perhaps some hired security personnel. IT security is no different.
How ACT360 IT Risk Assessment Works
Technical audits or security scans are not where we begin. We learn about your business first.
What processes absolutely cannot stop? What data is irreplaceable? What are your employees’ actual working habits with regard to technology? What would your customers do if systems were to go offline?
As soon as we grasp a sense of your business environment, we will be able to examine the areas in which IT risk would cause the most harm and emphasize defenses for those sections.
Our approach examines:
- Current infrastructure vulnerabilities
- Employee security behavior and training requirements
- Backup and recovery capabilities
- Compliance requirements for your industry
- Cost-effective security improvements
- Incident response planning
Perhaps most importantly, we explain IT risk in business language, not tech-speak. You get a clear picture of where you are exposed and what it would cost to fix that, versus the cost of vulnerabilities being exploited.
Read more about our IT risk assessment in detail
The One Question Every Business Owner Should Be Asking
The question isn’t, “Will something bad happen to our IT systems?”
The question is, “When this happens, will we be ready, or will we be running around to save this business?”
Because something will happen. You could lose data to a power outage, hardware failure, user error, an attack by another human, an earthquake, or just an ordinary software glitch. It’s the same unfortunate event, but the only variable rests in whether or not you’ve prepared for it.
Make the Change on Your Terms
Responding to disasters after the fact does not make strong businesses. They work by recognizing and containing risks before they swell into crises.
IT risk assessment is not about fear or paranoia. It’s making sure you know your weaknesses so that you can solve them in a strategic, cost-effective manner before they become an existential threat to everything you’ve built.
If your business hasn’t been through a thorough IT risk assessment in the past 12 months, you are flying blind on a key component of your business that could be dead overnight.
Don’t wait for a Tuesday morning crisis to reveal what you should have known on Monday.
Are you prepared to know your actual IT risk exposure? Call ACT360 for a thorough, bottom-line-oriented IT risk assessment.
T: 705-739-2281
