How important is cyber security to you? You folks in education, and healthcare how about you? IT professionals, I know you have your pretty little firewalls, but seriously does your software update every minute so it catches every threat out there? Perhaps its “good enough” It’s 2018, in case anyone hasn’t noticed and Cyber Security continues to be a huge issue for every business that has a network. That means EVERY business out there is subject to these threats.
In 2017, hackers stole $172 BILLION dollars from people all over the world according to an article from MIT Technology Review. $19.4 Billion happened in the United States. I am willing to bet that in each of these threats, those pretty little firewalls were up and running and all the lights were flashing that all was good in the world.
The forecast for 2018 isn’t any better. According to Forbes, education and healthcare are going to be big targets this year. Educational institutions lack resources to defend their endpoints. school systems are a lightly secure network of endpoints that contain personally identifiable information on students, parents and staff.
The increased use of IoT in the healthcare industry will also create data security concerns in 2018. In the era of connected devices, the healthcare industry needs to make patient security a top priority by increasing security protocols. To combat this, businesses should look to third-party security providers to encrypt these devices and monitor with live ethical hackers that can actually see an intrusion and catch it BEFORE it infects your network or brings it down.
So stopping it BEFORE devistation?? What a novel idea.
So why are we taking the Ostrich approach again? The pretty little firewalls we have so much faith in are obviously not getting the job done. Oh, oh wait it’s too expensive, right? Once a school is hacked and the child’s data is in the wrong hands, have you figure out what that childs value is? How much money does it cost you to be down?
Sometimes its expensive to be cheap. For a few hundred, maybe a few thousand dollars, you can stop adding to the billions lost. Get a pen test or have your network monitored.
Anne Tarantino
2 I.T. Girlz 