When Sites Like Twitter Are Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks, Should We Just Give Up?

Last Friday huge sites like Twitter, Netflix and Spotify were down for a while thanks to a massive cyber attack on domain provider, Dyn. According to an article in Fast Company, attackers were easily able to take over tens of thousands of home-based or small office devices that had poor security to mount the attack.

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We all know cyber attacks are a risk, and that we should be doing more to protect the security of our own information and that of our customers. And yet…

Few Companies Are Protecting Their Data Well

In today’s episode of the Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience I interview cyber security expert, Saar Cohn. He’s worked for huge international organizations like l’Oreal and Israel’s Defense Department, but says his real love is startups and small companies that are struggling to figure out how to avoid cyber attacks. (In fact, he’s offered to answer questions, free of charge, for any small businesses that have a concern about how to handle cyber security. Just send him an e-mail.)

This interview is a bit of a roller coaster, filled with both scary moments and great advice about how businesses of any size should prepare for and handle cyber security breaches.

Here’s the first bit of bad news from Cohn:

“You need to acknowledge that you are going to be breached or that you’ve already been breached and don’t know about it.”

Yes, folks, a cyber attack is only a matter of time.

To cheer you up even more, he comments that

“It’s proven that passwords are useless.”

So, as tempting as it is to go bury our heads in the sand now, we don’t dare do that. Because if a breach is only a matter of time, what can we do to minimize the damage?

Tips for Preventing a Cyber Attack

Decide what is most critical to your operation.

What would kill your business if it went down? What would be almost impossible to recover from?

You can’t effectively protect everything, so focus on the mission-critical parts of what you do.

Don’t be overly pressured by the cyber security vendors.

They make their living by scaring the living daylights out of all of us. In fact, if you buy too much security software and hardware, you can end up lowering your security!

Why?

Because if you are screening everything there’s so much “noise” in the data that you either get paralyzed or you start turning the warning systems off to shut them up. Result? There’s no “noise” and you think everything’s OK, when it isn’t.

Train your staff on cyber safety.

It’s a lot easier to fool humans than machines. Most cyber attacks succeed because of human weaknesses, such as wanting to help a stranger on the phone who seems to know what they are talking about, or being tempted to click on a link in an email when you really shouldn’t, or using default passwords like “admin”.

Keep your software up-to-date.

As annoying as it is to have to keep updating,