By Anita Byer, Setnor Byer Insurance & Risk October may officially be Cybersecurity Awareness Month, but that doesn’t mean businesses can afford to take the rest of the year off. Gone are the days when cybersecurity was seen as an ancillary function. Today, businesses should be...
Cyber criminals routinely incorporate the “crisis-du-jour” into scams to increase their likelihood of success. COVID-19, it seems, is no exception. In a single week, Google saw 18 million coronavirus-related malware and phishing emails…per day! It’s gotten so bad that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the...
Setnor Byer Insurance & Risk Small businesses spend a lot of time and money to protect their sensitive and confidential information, and rightfully so. Data breaches can lead to crippling, often insurmountable financial and reputational harm. Unfortunately, many businesses overlook the most basic security measures. Cyber...
Setnor Byer Insurance & Risk Did you know that the average ransomware demand in the first quarter of 2020 was $111,605? Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts critical data so it cannot be accessed without a decryption key. Victims must, you guessed it, pay...
Cybersecurity Awareness Month was launched in 2004 to promote online safety and security. This is particularly important in 2020 because so many things took a back seat when coronavirus disease 2019 arrived. COVID-19 may dominate the headlines, but data security breaches continue to pose a...
When it comes to data security breaches, things aren’t getting any better. According to Risk Based Security’s 2019 MidYear QuickView Data Breach Report, more than 3,800 data security breaches were reported in the first six months of 2019. More than 4.1 billion records were compromised. When compared to midyear 2018,...
Did you know that more than 50 percent of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) experienced a cyber-attack in the previous year? Cybercriminals tend to be opportunistic. They target the unprepared. Unfortunately, far too many SMBs don’t have a plan to prevent or respond to cyber-attacks. SMBs...
It looks like 2018 is going to be a record year for data breaches…in a bad way. Gemalto, a global digital security provider, released its Breach Level Index for the first half of 2018. It revealed a mix of good, bad and ugly. When compared...
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are sophisticated scams that commonly use social engineering, phishing and spoofing to compromise legitimate business e-mail accounts. In 2017, the FBI reported receiving 15,690 BEC complaints with BEC losses topping $675 million. The FBI warns small, medium and large businesses...
