Nowadays, the reality is that business networks get breached daily—and the fact is that the less security measures you take, the more likely you are to a severe hack regardless the size of your business. But what you might not realize is the more security measures you take to prevent a breach, the more downstream savings.
In this post, I will highlight how investing up front in network security will pay off big time! I call it the Cybercrime Snowball Effect because with every breach comes exponentially more costs.
You prevent your network getting infected—first and foremost, you avoid having malware installed and slowing down your machines. Malicious software commonly takes up processing time, uses resources and takes up space on local machines. The first few snowflakes form from your individual workers not getting their work done—or having problems with latency, slow computers and individual computer headaches!
Spreading Infection—When successfully installed, malware tries to corrupt your system and begin to steal credentials, lock down resources or steal data. At this stage, your systems are probably lost and need to be reloaded from backups. If you haven’t backed up your computers lately you may have priceless work product completely lost! If detected at this point, you’ve likely compromised only one computer. It might be painful to think about all the work and progress lost—especially if the infected machine stored critical information, but at least at this point it’s contained.
Unfortunately, most attacks are not even detected at this point!
Quarantine proliferated malware infection—Typically, the average time to detection is near 14 weeks! Sometimes the run of the mill IT department will be able to detect it here, but more often it is detected when users start to have major issues. Often shared resources across the network are no affected and passwords and credentials across multiple machines now reside in the malware. The actual infection normally only takes a few days, as others connect to the infection source. At this point, the cost of remediation swells as investigation needs to understand where the infection lies, what has been lost and how much needs to be done. This remediation is time-consuming and costly (not to mention the cost of any lost data!).
Stolen data and encrypted files—even if you detected an infection on your network, the trouble is not over. Important business data likely was stolen or encrypted as part of the malware attack. Sensitive emails may have been accessed and your organization may suffer a huge blow. Not to mention any regulatory pressure, fines, governmental audits and liability claims from victim clients that may trickle your way. The costs really can be enormous after a breach—and they may continue to grow as damages are assessed. Your reputation may be permanently tarnished.
What your doctor said about your health is equally true about network security: prevention is better than a cure!
Which is better: eating right and exercising or neglecting good habits and getting a coronary bypass surgery a few years down the line?
Stopping threats as close as possible to the infection point is key. And preventing attacks from breaching your network is paramount. The way to reduce your costs long term are to keep up with healthy security habits.
Contact Cheryl Gholson on our team today to get started with a plan to eliminate vulnerabilities and prevent a snowballing problem! It’s never too early to prevent a catastrophe!
