International cyber wars have been in the news a quite a bit lately. Countries are attacking other countries. Computer servers are being hacked by sophisticated government operations. Identity theft is now so rampant that the theft of an American person’s identity happens once every few seconds. A study conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research found that during 2017 about 16.7 million Americans were subject to identity theft. This caused over $17 billion in losses from the data breaches. Businesses are not immune to these attacks either.
North Korean cyber attackers are thought to have hacked cryptocoin currency exchanges in South Korea and Japan. They got away with stealing the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. Then, the perceived technical vulnerabilities of the cryptocurrency exchanges caused the value of all of the cryptocurrencies to decrease rapidly. About half of the value of all the cryptocurrencies disappeared in less than a few weeks, which represented more than $42 billion in lost value that evaporated during June 2018. The most popular one, Bitcoin, suffered the greatest loss of value.
Other cyber-criminal hackers distribute a vicious form of malware called “ransomware” that infects computers, encrypts the files, and then the hackers demand payment in anonymous cryptocurrency for the key needed to unlock the files. They promise to send the unlock keycode for payment; however, they may not send it, even if the ransom is paid.
Businesses that make use of bank wire transfers are seeing attacks that divert funds from their business account. Hackers get the information they need by doing “spearfishing” with keyloggers to capture personal information. They get the passcodes to bank accounts or simply use an email that seems to come from the boss to instruct a worker in the company to make a payment to the criminals.
This is an important warning for the big businesses, as well as for the small-to-medium-sized businesses, which are located in the service area for Sentree Systems in Indiana. This includes the cities of Avon, Carmel, Fishers, Indianapolis, Noblesville, Plainfield, and the surrounding areas. You need Sentree Systems on your side to fight this menace.
World War III has already started and it is a cyber war. The attacks do not even need to directly focus on your company to cause great harm. They can be against critical infrastructure, electrical power grids, banking networks etc. All of these attacks can be disruptive and damaging to every business that uses these systems.
Having high-defense IT security and a comprehensive plan for disaster response for your business is no longer something that can be left to do some time in the future. In fact, this needs to have already been done and regularly updated for the ongoing and upcoming threats. Contact Sentree Systems at 317-939-3282 or email info@sentreesystems.com to set up an appointment for a comprehensive IT security review to help mitigate the serious risks that all American businesses are now facing.
