https://youtu.be/tZNRPyhkz6E?si=2u0SCVcYpqNXd7e-
Roland Parker: And we work very closely with. They’re one of our cybersecurity backup partners. We’re very fortunate today to have Jason with us. Jason, tell us a little bit about yourself and about your company, the presentation.
Jason Price: Yeah, absolutely. So Jason Price, I am what we call a channel development manager. Essentially, I travel all over the country more than I’d like to admit. And I go through and sit through presentations and participate in presentations and talk about things from cybersecurity, the landscape, different frameworks. My company, you know, as Roland mentioned, we do everything from backup solutions. We do, you know, a bunch of different types of security or components of cybersecurity stacks. And it’s all the different tool sets that they use to help make sure that you guys are protected. And it’s tough going after an FBI agent, right? You have all the credibility in the world. I’m always thinking and never thinking that I want to talk about, oh, another thing. And I’m scared to answer because if I get it wrong, then I’m like, I have no credibility.
Speaker3: So on the same page, there’s so much pressure now.
Jason Price: All right, guys, but I’m gonna try. So the first thing I want to just show is this picture that we have right here. This is me just driving down the highway, and I said, oh, this is a cool picture. But what I wanted to show with this is that we are driving the car. Where are you looking?
Speaker3: At the screen.
Jason Price: Right. So some people are looking. Some people are looking at the Dunkin Donuts car. Yeah, right. Some people are looking at maybe the front of the hood, and then some people may be looking like a quarter mile down the road. Is there a better. What’s the where’s the best place to be looking when driving on a highway? A quarter mile down the road, right? It’s not the kid in the back seat. It’s not the radio. It’s a quarter mile down the road. Right. Because you’re able to see what’s coming and be able to act accordingly and make adjustments. Switch lanes, speed up, hit your brakes. But if you’re looking at the cup, you’re looking at the front of the car. You’re probably going to get an accident, right? Right. So that’s how I think about technology and technology landscape. If you’re looking just like in the car or you know, the rearview mirror, right? That’s things like, you know, the old problems. We used to talk about accidental deletion, you know, a hardware failure, right. The blue screen of death, the hard drive failed. The natural disasters. Right. Fires, floods, tornadoes. You want to make sure you’re backing up or protecting your data. Then you have the end of the hood. Right? So that’s more things come into play now. That’s where we started having the conversation around ransomware. We had the conversations about stricter regulations. You know, SaaS provider failures. Right. But then a quarter mile down the road, where does that leave me? What are the things that you need to see coming so you can adapt, change, pivot to make sure that you prepare for that moment? So I just want to go on a base level of security, right.
Jason Price: So in your organizations, right, your businesses, you make sure the doors are locked. Right. That’s security. You make sure the windows are locked. If you’re doing some of these taxes and you mess up, what do you do with those? That paper. Shredder. Right. I’m looking for affirmation. Right? Yes, right. File cabinets. Right. So they’re locked, right? And you’re in possession of that key. You don’t have it locked, and you don’t just have a key hanging somewhere, right? So that, on a basic level, is security. When we jump up, we’re stepping up a level to cyber security. People have a limited view of cybersecurity. Right. You think about antivirus, right? That’s something from like the 80s that is just ingrained in us, right, that we need to have the antivirus, McAfee or whatever, whatever, whatever. You know, security is coming bigger, more people are understanding that, hey, I need to secure my emails. Multi-factor authentication. It starts to become more normalized. It’s the most annoying thing in the world. I know. We all know it sucks when you want to get into something here. Your phones all be over there. You go get your phone in order to get it. Something that’s over here, right? It sucks, but it works. It’s effective. Perimeter security. Even getting into this building today, I had to get a QR code. I had to go and scan my QR code in order for me to get access into the building.
Jason Price: Right. So these are things that are becoming more and more normalized. What’s the next iteration? What’s the quarter mile down the road? What other things should we be thinking about? Cyber resilience. Anybody want to take a stab of what. Being cyber resilient. Resilience is. Okay, so everything is a measure of a business, of a business strength in preparing for, operating through and recovering from the eventuality of a cyber attack. So this is just preventing somebody coming into your system with the antivirus. This is saying that, hey, everything we do, you still have the possibility that there will be some sort of intrusion. However, how fast can you work through that? How resilient resilient are you? How how fast can you get back to normal operating procedure? Is it an hour? Is it a day? Are you down for a week? A month? And then you start thinking about what’s that threshold of pain of being down for a week, a month. And does it change during the time of year? If it happens in March, is that worse off for you guys than it happening in December? I don’t know. I assume so because I know taxes are due in April. Right? So there’s different points of pressure at that point. So cyber resilience relies on the successful ability to identify, protect, protect respond and recover. Essentially what this is called this is called the Mis framework. Anybody familiar with the framework.
Speaker3: Yeah. Are you okay with this. Okay.
Jason Price: You can take photo. Just make sure you get my good side.
Speaker3: Got it. How many.
Jason Price: Photos? I also told them that they can send you the the PDF version of this as well. So. Yeah. So you don’t have to worry about doing anything. But if you would like, please, please do so. Thank you. So within this framework is one of many types of frameworks. There’s not one good framework that’s better than the other, but there’s some that’s better for certain organizations in certain verticals. So identify right. That’s the first thing when we talk about like risks to your organization, you want to identify what those risks may be would identify all the different assets that you may have. You know, if we’re talking about the physical building, the physical office, how many computers do you guys have? How many laptops do you guys have? How many, you know, web cameras or security cameras do you guys have? Where are the locations? Is there anything else getting giving off a Wi-Fi signal? These are the things that you need to understand in order to be able to then protect. So you know what you have. You’re able to now say, okay, we’re going to protect this. And if that means putting antivirus or something, or this means, you know, making sure that you no longer just have files out in public and that they’re in a specific room and you’re protecting it via that physical barrier. That’s the bill. It’s a mechanism to detect, right? Yes. I want to make sure that I have in my computer, but I need something to make sure that we’re detecting any sort of anomalies in there.
Jason Price: So we need to be able to respond. And then once we respond, right. Once we identify, once we detect, once we respond, we’re able to then recover and get back to normal. So I like this slide right here. Identify once again protect detect respond recover. The first three are have to do more with cybersecurity right. What you do this is all cybersecurity. These two right here respond to recover. That is business continuity. That’s what you do in terms of making sure that you don’t have downtime right. Because downtime is bad for business. I love this right here where it’s technology people and process. In the beginning, what is cybersecurity when it’s identified protect and detect you highly leveraging technology. So if you’re working with with with with impress they’ll give you a full stack of different tools. Right? They’ll give you the antivirus, they’ll have EDR, they’ll have, you know, backup. They’ll have all these different things that they will employ. There’s highly leveraging technology. But as you get further down, you now have to leverage more people, right? The guys in the back of the room, the smart people. Right. They have to go in and say, okay, there was an intrusion. There wasn’t an infection, there was ransomware. We need to now respond and recover. That is a human element, the people element. But one thing that never wavers, something that ever changes throughout this whole thing, are the processes that are outlined, the processes, the process.
Jason Price: You don’t deviate from the process. The minute you deviate from a process, that’s when things go downhill, because at the end of the day. We’re all waiting for this moment right here. That’s that boom moment. That’s when you walk into a room, you open up the computer and as in that video and it says $50,000 needed for your files for you to get your files back, right. It’s all anticipation for that. Because at that boom moment, right when when they say, okay, what do we do? How do we do it? You know, what’s the drill? Who do I call? Right. That is that that that resilient part where it’s like, how fast or how long am I going to be down? How fast can I get back to being resilient? And it’s all about here because prior to the boom, it could have been minutes or months that somebody was in your system doing research on your system, research on you figuring out how to maneuver, figuring out what the plan of attack is going to be. Once you had the exploitation, that boom moment after that, it could be minutes to months to get back to normalcy, right? It’s all going to be dependent on your planning, your education, the tool sets that you have in place in order to make sure that you’re as resilient as you possibly can be. So every single industry is susceptible to be targets of criminals, right? There are some that are more so at different times of the year.
Jason Price: For instance, health care during Covid, that was like the number one area that was affected by ransomware, by breaches, by spoofing, because everybody was concerned about health. Right. There’s more activity going to those sites. There’s more emails going out. People were working remotely. It was just a perfect catalyst to for for these criminals because of Covid, during certain times of the year, right. When there’s more pressure, you know, because of your field, right? If you’re a CPA, you need to make sure that you know, whatever your documents are done is signed. You have to make sure that the corporate tax season is finished and the individual tax season finished. Whatever. All the things that you do that you know better than me, right? The criminals know what your timeline is as well. So you may see different peaks and valleys in terms of when there’s more activity of them trying to infiltrate. So one of the big things is that I’ve always heard is that people say I’m too small, nobody cares about my data, right? Who am I? I’m just a, you know, a small time girl. Small time guy. Nobody cares about me. And you’re right. They don’t really care about you at all. They care about how much your data means to you. I don’t care about your data, but your kid, right? Your grandkids. Right? Like you just all your pictures that you have of them, right? Because nobody prints out votes anymore, right? Imagine never seeing those again.
Jason Price: You want those back, right? Right. Give me $10,000. You can have your own pictures back because I don’t want those. I don’t care about the pictures. You like the pictures. And you can extend that to pretty much anything, right? Your your business stuff, your former returns, all of those things are things that they know that you care about. So why typically in this room, you guys have probably the most valuable information out of any profession, right? You have people social security numbers, EIA numbers. You have account numbers. You have everything. You guys are the perfect. Yeah. You guys are the perfect people to rob. I’m sorry, but you are. It’s a dream. I can go out there and try to go and steal from, you know, a thousand different businesses. Or I can just take 100 of each one of your clients. That equals a thousand businesses. And therefore I did that in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, 8 in 8 attempts. Rather than try to rob 1000 people, it makes sense. You guys have the keys to the kingdom. You guys host sensitive information. Smes often lack strong cybersecurity defenses. Data is hosted in many locations. Anybody saving their data on a USB stick? Hard drive. You said not anymore. After five minutes ago, she called back to the office and pulled it out. Now.
Speaker3: The day. But now we have cloud.
Jason Price: Okay, awesome awesome.
Speaker3: Awesome.
Jason Price: Compliance obligation. Right? So they know that you have to keep data for a certain amount of time. There’s going to be plenty of it. Right? So there’s different reasons why they want your data. Right. And you can’t turn on the news without seeing a situation where a big major corporation, the company, has been compromised. Anybody seen this happen the other day?
Speaker3: Yes.
Jason Price: Yeah. People couldn’t get into their rooms. Imagine the. A GM property in Vegas and you can’t even get it to your room. You couldn’t.
Roland Parker: You can’t even use the elevator. You couldn’t.
Speaker3: You couldn’t even see.
Jason Price: You couldn’t even stand on the other side of your door and just wish you were inside. You had to go from the lobby, right? There were signs talking about it throughout. Right. It was to the point where even the. You couldn’t gamble. What could you do in Vegas if you can’t sleep? You can’t drink. You can’t eat. You can’t gamble. This is the worst place on earth to be. Right. And then they ended up, like, giving out, like, vouchers so people can, like, at least get something to eat. That’s how bad it was. And they’re still reeling from it, right? A lot of it has been corrected. However, there are still a lot of bad things that are going on over there. From what I understand, the last I heard, somebody just called up their support, pretended to be an employee, and was able to get into the network. They won. I don’t want anybody to lose their job, but that guy probably needs to lose his job. If they feel like that happened. Right? Yeah. It just wasn’t a good fit for him.
Speaker3: Do you ever deal with cyber insurance?
Jason Price: Um. Me personally.
Speaker3: Like, do you go on site after there’s an incident? Because I know, you know, a company that, you know, had a cyber insurance policy, and then they send a team when something like this is going on and help you manage it. Have you ever been involved in. I haven’t, I have.
Jason Price: I’ve worked with people who actually have done that. And that is a nightmare of a situation as well. Right. Anybody here have cyber security insurance? No.
Speaker3: We do.
Jason Price: Right.
Speaker4: But even I’ve heard of some insurances are going on the front end where before actually giving you the insurance they’ll do certain review certain components. And it is.
Jason Price: They’re still trying to figure out this process of how to do it. Every single insurance company seems to operate in a different way. But generally speaking, if you want cyber security insurance, every one of you should have or need to have. Right. You would have to do like an evaluation of your whole network and processes. Typically you want to go with like an outside person to do it. So like I would get like interest to come in and actually do that for you. Right. They’re going to ask questions that you need to be brutally honest with you. Right. You can’t muddy the waters if they’re saying, hey, are you using multi-factor authentication? It needs to be. Yes. We are using multiple multi-factor authentication on this. On this, any we access this. If you say you are and you are not, and you get a.
Speaker4: Claim and you.
Jason Price: Have a claim.
Roland Parker: That’s okay because that’s why your IT person’s got to you’ve got to say, I’ve got a cyber insurance policy. Get Ahold of your IT guy. He’s going to go through with you because they’re going to ask you, do you have EDR? Do you have a 24/7 SoC? Do you have MFA? And you’re going, I don’t even know what this is. But you mark down that you’ve got it because that’s the only reason why they’re going to give it to you. And you don’t have it. Guess what? Insurance companies are losing money. So they’re going to stop losing money because they’re not going to pay out. Yeah. So if you claim and you said that you had it and you can’t prove it, then your claim is going to be denied.
Jason Price: There was a there was a big company that had a ransomware attack. They had insurance through travelers. Travelers paid out over $2 million. They then in review realized that the people never had multi multi-factor authentication authenticated, and they actually sued the company to recover that $2 million. Wow. So yeah. So it’s like you need somebody to, you know, make sure that you guys are answering that questionnaire out accurately, but then post that you have to make sure that someone is consistently monitoring it to make sure that nothing changes. Right. Because the minute something is different from from that question there, they won’t pay. And it’s just I’ve seen too many bad experiences with that.
Speaker3: Yeah.
Jason Price: So how often is a business hit with ransomware? So 43% of cybersecurity incidents are for small and medium sized businesses. Anybody want to take a stab at as to why it’s easier? It’s easier. Yeah. It’s easier.
Speaker4: Probably less control. Or they think less control less. I guess that’s the easier like.
Jason Price: It’s easier to to get, you know, the CPA over here than it is to get it to the Coca-Cola organization. Right. It’s less effort. You know, they have billions of dollars that they’re spending on cybersecurity infrastructure here versus, you know, over here, maybe a couple of thousand dollars a year, right. So that’s another another reason. The other reason is that most small and medium sized businesses are sole proprietorships. And so you don’t have anybody to fall back on. Right? So the FBI agent, rightfully so, said you should not pay to get your data back. But. That meant that you no longer can be in business because you don’t have the data you need. Are you going to pay? Are you going to take that risk? I’m going to take the risk. I’m going to pay it. I have no choice. I can’t I don’t have anybody else to rely on. My kids still need to go to private school. You know, my my daughter still needs to go to, you know, get, you know, get get a get a car. Like, there’s so much things that you have to think about as a business owner that’s like, no, I’m just going to pay and hope for the best. 85% of all email attachments are harmful. There’s better ways to send and receive any sort of files and attachments. 91% of attacks are launched from a phishing attack.
Jason Price: There are over 24,000 new malicious apps removed from the App Store daily. That was a shocking number to me. Businesses hit with ransomware every 13.275 seconds, right? And we see it right. I just googled the other day, you know, you know, accountants and ransomware and this and the other and a whole bunch of stuff came up. All of the big four accounting firms were breached. It’s scary. So what can be done about it? Right. So first off I’ll talk about just backup. Right. So we mentioned backup. This is a me pitching you to to get data product or anything of that nature. But this will illustrate the need, the value and how you should look at backup. Right. So interesting interesting statistic is 60% of small businesses that are victims of cyber attack go out of business within six months. A lot of times it’s just too hard to recover. This right here is probably going to be the most one of the most important things I want you to take away today. This is an RPO. So let’s say everything is going fine. You come into work one day and your screen says you have ransomware. Being ransomware is right here. You have two factors that you need to weigh in on. One is recovery time objective. What that means is how long can I be down? How long could that computer not be working? Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? Is it a day? Like, what is that upper limit of your threshold for pain, right.
Jason Price: Some people, if you’re highly transactional, you may say, hey, I cannot be down longer than three hours. That is like after that I’m hurting bad. Another company can say, you know what? We’re used to do this stuff on paper. We can be down for at least a week before we feel a pain. That is an individual thing that you have to think about for your organization, right? To see how long you can be down. The other point. Right. So once again, ransomware is right here. You want to get up as quickly as possible to say, we want to get up an hour so we can get up in an hour. But RPO recovery point objective is how long ago was the last good backup point? It’s great to get up in an hour, but it sucks to get up in an hour if you have data from two weeks ago, right? If I want to get up an hour, I want to get as close to that disaster. I want to be like five minutes before that disaster happened or 20 minutes before that disaster happened. So like you guys would.
Roland Parker: Also say, you know. Was down for a week and it wasn’t tax crunch. You can manage it, but if it’s coming to the 15th and you’ve got to get that stuff and suddenly you’re every single person in your company shut down, how quickly are you going to want to get up and running? So you’ve got to look at even if you’ve got a backup, if it’s going to take you three days to get all your data back and running, and you can’t do anything in that time, and it’s the 13th of the month, can you afford to be down for three days? So that’s what you’ve got to look at. Not only have I got a backup, how quickly can I recover in that event? Exactly.
Jason Price: So RPO very very important. So you need to think about what is important. And once again seasonally it can change. But you have to think about worst case scenario. Where do you want to be. Right. So it doesn’t matter if you have like a virtual environment. It doesn’t matter if you post data in the cloud. It doesn’t matter if it is know physical environment, it a hybrid. There are different ways to make sure that all of that data is backed up. So I just wanted to make sure that that was clear because some people say, well, you know, we don’t really use this type of data or really work in this sort of method. It doesn’t matter how you work. Data is still being generated and data still needs to be preserved. Right. And so there’s different ways that we help to make sure that your data is safe and accessible. So just to show you how our solution would work. Right. And by our solution generally, anybody who’s doing this sort of 3 to 1 sort of backup would work. Right. So you have your computers. We’re able to back them up as often as every five minutes. We’re able to then do a couple of things right. We’re able to take that data. And because we’ve been backing up every five minutes, if you take a full image        of everything, if your computer was to get the virus or a ransomware or just shut down or somebody stole it, would you be able to bring up your data in exactly how it looks on your current computer within minutes? We also do something called offsite in the data because you don’t only want the data on that network, right? What if it happened? Something crazy happens, right? What if, unfortunately, a flood happens? What if a fire happened in.
Roland Parker: 2017 and most businesses were underwater? Yes.
Speaker3: Right.
Jason Price: So you want data on site, but you also want it to be somewhere else secure. So what we do is we make sure that we send it to our own private data center. And then what we also do is we cross replicate it to another part of the country. So something happens to your immediate office. It’s okay. We have the data in Pennsylvania. Something happens along the whole East Coast. You probably have bigger fish to fry at that point. However, we have your data over in Utah as well. So just another visual of how it works. Everything is working well. Your computer is going. It’s flowing. All of a sudden you get that ugly ransomware notification. But because you’ve been backing it up to a backup device, you’re able to get back working how it was prior to any sort of infection. So with this virtualization, it reduces your downtime. It’s local in cloud. And then it’s also going to help once again with your auto and RPO. And for bonus points. Anybody remember what and RPO stands for.
Speaker3: Recovery.
Jason Price: Well what was.
Speaker3: Recovery or.
Jason Price: Recovery time objective. Recovery point. Objective. Yeah. You get bonus points. They don’t mean anything but bonus points. So it’s also important to remember that if anybody here using like Google Workspace anybody using Microsoft 365 okay. All right. So that data that lives there also needs to be backed up.
Roland Parker: Because Microsoft doesn’t back it up.
Jason Price: They don’t back it up for you right.
Speaker3: Oh no.
Jason Price: Oh gosh.
Speaker3: No no no.
Jason Price: And the thing is that we’re seeing more and more threats happening via Microsoft survive, especially after 2020. Right. Because 2020, that’s when Covid happened. That’s when everybody started working remotely. That’s when everybody’s companies started like changing out their exchange servers from Microsoft. 365 and, you know, getting teams so everybody can collaborate. And there was just way it was like a 700% increase in utilization for Microsoft. 365. And that has caused a lot of bad things as well. So why. Right. Why do you need to make sure that you protect. Right. So Microsoft and Google they provide security of the cloud.
Speaker3: In.
Jason Price: You provide for security within their cloud, right? So they even have a Eula which says that they are not responsible for the data. They’re not responsible. You know, if they’re the system is down and you lose out on $1 million contract because you can’t access your data, you cannot sue them. It’s all within their Eula, right? Microsoft has no liability for the deletion of customer data or personal data as described in the section. Two, to make it look, you know, to make more sense. This is Microsoft over here. They’re going to be responsible for hardware failure right. So if their servers malfunction or whatever and they have put new servers in. That’s on them. That’s what they’re responsible for. Software failures, natural disaster, power outages. Right. They have redundant power supplies. They have redundant internet lines and feeds and dedicated internet. Any of that stuff goes awry and Microsoft is responsible. But in terms of the stuff that’s inside of it, right, that’s on you guys, right? Or if you have a managed service provider like impress that’s on them. They’re going to. So you’re responsible for human error right. Programmatic errors, malicious insiders, external hackers, viruses and malware. So people don’t realize that Microsoft 65 can get hit with ransomware with with Microsoft 65. If you’re using like, you know, the SharePoint and teams and that nature and you have everything that collaborates. So if you make a change here, it changes there. If you get a virus and the virus or ransomware gets into that SharePoint file, it can traverse everything, right.
Jason Price: And so you can get pretty much either corruption or you can get ransomware even in that data set. Human error. I mean, this happens all the time. Anybody ever get the alert that you’re like 99% at capacity? You get to free up space. I get it all the time. I wait till the last possible day and then I just delete everything and then always remember, like a month later, like, damn, I think I deleted that thing too. I was supposed to delete that, right? But it’s too late, right? It’s gone. And so that happens, right? And it’s not sinister or anything like that. It’s just you just deleting everything because you finally decided to do it because you were 99% full. There’s been situations where people leave a firm, they go to another company, they try to take all their data and they try to delete everything, right? They try to take the book of business, their customers, you know, sales data, and they try to delete it so they don’t leave any trails. So they don’t help the former company out. They can see they’re going to the new company. And so we see a lot of that happening. So backing up that of information protects the company as well. So what else should we be thinking about. Right. I know we talked about a lot today. I know the FBI scared the hell out of me too. But what else? Right. Deepfake technology. Anybody familiar with deepfake technology? Deepfake is so scary because what deepfake is, is using computer algorithms and software to manipulate what you’re seeing.
Jason Price: So this is Obama talking. This is this gentleman right here talking. This is a computer program which is mapping his actions and his talking and putting it on President Obama. When you look at this right here, I just I had no idea he was in this movie. I must’ve been watching the whole movie, the wrong movie my whole life. But if you see, if you Google deepfake videos and you can go and you can see people taking people’s faces and putting it from here to here, changing the voice and everything, like, that’s insane. And it’s at its infancy now. Think about it. Right. What are we talking about earlier? You get an email. Hey, I need you to send a half $1 million to this new vendor. We say call them up, right. Get them on a zoom call. Imagine there’s going to be a point where you try to get something on a zoom call, and you’re going to be talking to him, you’re going to be talking to him, but you’re really talking to him. That’s a scary thought, right? But it’s getting so realistic. It’s getting so fluid. Right. These are the things you just have to think about. Right? So it’s not only just call somebody, but maybe there is just an internal method that you guys communicate to verify some of these true intent. Hey, if I ever need this, this is what I’m going to tell you.
Speaker3: So like my team, we have this. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Price: And and you don’t tell anybody else. And if anybody deviates from that, you automatically know that this is not right. This is the fake voice technology, right? This is scary. Right. Because once again this is. You call them to verify and validate if somebody is able to answer the phone. That sounds just like your boss. Anybody know what a voice print is? So we all have a unique voice print second fingerprint. So when I call my bank I have TD Bank North. If I call from my phone number and I and somebody picks up and they hear my voice, it automatically, automatically verifies who I am. I don’t have to answer any questions. I can just start talking and they will start helping me. Very convenient or very scary. Right? Right. They understand that they have my voice signature pads. These bad guys are doing the same thing. That’s why when people call my phone, I don’t recognize the number and I pick up. I actually try to disguise my voice, even though it sounds stupid. These people are trying to get the voice samples from people. Right. It’s scary. It’s something we have to think about. I wouldn’t over do it. I don’t want you to sound like that, man. Hello? Who’s this? No need for all that. But it’s something that I think about whenever I get these calls.
Speaker3: I think I.
Speaker5: Read something that says, even if you try to fake. There’s something in your voice that can pick up the real voice. It doesn’t pick up the.
Speaker3: The the disguise.
Jason Price: Probably just.
Speaker3: I’ll probably just go to the route.
Jason Price: You’re probably laughing at me as I say. My voice. All right. Um. And so, like, there’s a ton of stuff going on, right? If you just Google, you know, deepfake voice technology, right? There was a mother who got a call from scammers, right? Similar to, like, my sister sister’s story, but they put the daughter on the phone. Allegedly, they sounded like her daughter. This woman ended up paying, so I forgot how much. Thousands of dollars to these kidnappers. The kidnappers. Only to realize her daughter came to the door like 15 minutes later. All right. It’s a.
Speaker3: Real thing.
Jason Price: It’s a real thing. And then this AI driven malware. Right? Technology. Once again, you can leverage technology to be able to be more powerful in bad ways than ever before, right? Very, very effective. It thinks for itself. It can solve the CAPTCHAs. I can’t even solve the captions a lot of times. Right. You have to, like, draw something around a cat, or you have to say, you know, this bus, which blocks are these buses in? And you have to put it in. It keeps making you try again and again and again. So I don’t know how they’re able to solve it in a real human can’t solve it, but they’re able to solve it.
Speaker5: I’m sorry for my ignorance. What is captured?
Speaker3: Huh?
Speaker5: Sorry for my ignorance, but I don’t know.
Speaker3: So you’re really trying to.
Jason Price: Go to a website? You put your password in and it says we need to verify your human. So it says tap all the boxes that you see sidewalks.
Speaker3: Sidewalks or bicycles. Right. Yeah.
Jason Price: Like, is that bike tire in that square or not? Yeah. You start trying to magnify it and everything and it’s just like the worst. That’s where the Captcha is. So it’s a way to try to limit the bots and AI and things of that nature. But it’s not working that well.
Speaker3: Okay.
Jason Price: It just creates more chaos for us. It saves the skin social media to find contacts, and it’s able to create more customized messaging for you. Right. And it knows how to target you. Right. So it’s pretty crazy that we have ChatGPT. Luckily, it’s been getting stupider and stupider ever since its inception, right? It’s not able to be as quick as it used to be. However, we do see that it’s going to be changing as it gets into different iterations of it. So one of the things is they have put a bunch of restrictions on ChatGPT and what it could, could it do? And for the most part it worked. But ChatGPT is so smart that it was able to trick its own set of rules to be able to do something that’s not supposed to do. Like it like hired somebody from, like, TaskRabbit to do a task. And since it wasn’t ChatGPT doing the task and it was somebody that ChatGPT hired, it was able to go through that scary, like, like, I can’t kill somebody, but I can hire a hitman to kill somebody, but I didn’t kill somebody. It’s just kind of kind of kind of creepy. Kind of scary. But this is the world that we’re living in, right? Anybody here still working in the office? Everybody working from home. Hybrid. Hybrid. Hybrid. So? So we’re seeing more and more food workplaces as well, where people are working two days in the office, three days at home, or vice versa.
Jason Price: And there’s a lot to have to think about with that as well, because when you’re on your own network, is your own network typically as secure as your company’s network? Right. You got a lot of people on that network, right? You have kids, grandkids, husbands. I mean, all these different people doing different activities, right? Sometimes they may meet, even catch a kid on your computer or computer. You’re like, hey, hey, you can’t be on that computer, right? There’s all these different factors that, that, that happen. And so we have to think about that, right? How can we make sure that we’re still protecting the company, protecting the organization while still being able to to give you the flexibility to have the hybrid schedule IoT internet of things? There are 11.2 billion connected devices today, but tomorrow is going to be over 20 billion connected devices. In this room alone, there’s probably 30 different connected devices. If you have Apple Watch or Samsung Watch, Apple Phone, whatever. All those things are connected devices. It’s even to the point now where they have connected interesting stuff, like they have like Wi-Fi lawnmower, right? That’s kind of scary. Like the poor squirrels they have. They have Wi-Fi, diapers, I found out. Did you know that? They know that. What Pampers.
Speaker3: How does that work?
Jason Price: So I didn’t say I looked into it, but I have a two year old. I was good, but it tells you it gets you alert when the kid uses the bathroom.
Speaker3: Oh, wow. Oh that’s.
Jason Price: Crazy right? Right. It’s just like insane. Like like as I was about to purchase, I’m like, am I being a bad parent? And I decided that I was going to do it, but I really wanted to.
Speaker5: And then you put it, you put that on Instagram.
Speaker3: That my.
Speaker5: Son did.
Speaker3: That.
Jason Price: So he’s regular.
Speaker3: Oh so true. I just bought like a new stove and.
Speaker6: They told me, do you want it with Wi-Fi or is it.
Speaker3: Connected to the.
Speaker6: Wi-fi? And so I’m like the stove. I mean, I’m supposed to be there to cook, you know, like, what would I need? I know it will alert you when.
Speaker3: Yeah. The crazy thing is.
Speaker6: Like, how much is it?
Jason Price: Technology is crazy. Yeah. Those those are like, I’m a tech guy. I look into that.
Speaker6: Oh, can you imagine a stove telling you food is ready. Come over. Yeah.
Speaker3: It’ll actually cook it. You can listen.
Jason Price: To that as well. It will keep the food like at a at a safe temperature during the day. Like it’ll keep it like cool enough. And so if you want it to kick on at a certain time, you can turn your stove on remotely. And by the time you get home from work, the dinner will be cooked. Wow. Right? But you have to remember, as you introduce more of these IoT things into your life, they are. It does add more layers of the ability to to be compromised, right? Because you have to think how often are there updates on the stove.
Speaker3: Right.
Jason Price: These Wi-Fi light bulbs, how often are there updates? Right. When these vulnerabilities happen, how often is it updated? Right. So it’s a lot of things to kind of think about with that.
Speaker5: Well, I have been taking some other cybersecurity courses that and the people said, you know, those people teaching or I said, I am not in social media, I don’t recommend social media. You don’t want to have a smart TV. You don’t want to have a smart anything in your house, because the more you have, the more you. But it’s funny because you get to the point where you want to be tech savvy. You want to, you know. But so if you say you don’t use something people like, oh, you know, so and so is afraid of technology, there’s just a difference between being afraid and being conservative in terms of protecting your identity.
Speaker3: I think coming to things.
Jason Price: Like this and just hearing like what people are saying and, you know, the new information that’s coming out, I think that right there will help guide you. I don’t think you have to like, limit like, you know, social media and not getting like the tech, like you just have to be smart and responsible with it. And I think that it’s not it’s not that big of a of a issue. So rounding third base guys we’re almost finished. We’re almost home. Right. So what do you what can you do? Number one, always understand that you are a target. Whether you’re online or you’re offline. It does not matter. You have the ability to be targeted and to be compromised. Make sure that you have some policies and procedures written down right of like how you handle everything about your organization, right? I’m talking about how you handle customers sensitive information, right? How how do you report if there is been a potential breach or, you know, personal identifying information is found where it’s not supposed to be? Like, have all of that laid out. Don’t make it a guesswork base.
Jason Price: Ongoing employee training. If you took employees out of the equation, right, 99.9% of the time you’re going to run safe. The minute you add the people element, that’s when things go haywire. So make sure that we’re training, training, training. I like how you said that your company, they do the training for emails of that nature. So you aware to know what to look for right. That’s important. You spend the time with your people. You go with these types of things, and then you reduce the amount of risk that you have. Hazard management I use a password manager. I recommend it for other people as well. I also use the password manager that comes with like Apple. Excuse me, is is pretty secure and I have not had a problem with it thus far. Use multi-factor authentication. Right? That right there is key. Once again, it is very annoying, but it is very, very powerful. Make sure that it’s an app based MFA as opposed to like an SMS based MFA. The SMS ones or the ones that come through as like a text?
Speaker3: Yes, those.
Jason Price: Can be spoofed easily. The ones that are app based? Not so much.
Speaker6: So how do you how do you mean? One comes in a text and the other one.
Jason Price: So one comes in like a like a text format. The other one would be like through an app like like octa.
Speaker3: Or dual.
Jason Price: Duo. Okay. Who do you who do you guys usually typically use?
Roland Parker: You can use the Microsoft Microsoft one okay. But if you’re just getting it text, it’s not going to be as secure. Because also with that you can have your biometrics. You scan them with your thumbprint, then you get in. Then you generate a code that changes all the time. But the text coming in, it gets through. It’s it’s a lot they’re finding to to which is just the text is what they used to use. But even Microsoft now is saying on all Microsoft has 365, they’re probably going to force people to go multi-factor authentication, which is by using that two emails.
Speaker3: Sometimes they say you can get a text or yeah.
Roland Parker: But what happens if your email is compromised then then you’re just giving the bad guys the code. So that’s why you really want to have it outside of your computer environment by coming to it with with that app on your phone, it generates a code that changes every 60s. So that’s much more difficult. But if they send a code to your email, if the hackers got email, guess what? You’ve just given them the keys.
Jason Price: So that all your devices unattended, right? So I go to the dentist all the time and I go to check in with the receptionist. And she’s never there. She’s always in the back. And I look over and I just see all this just information on the computer. I give somebody the opportunity to take people’s information, put a heart, a thumb drive in. There’s so many things you can do in that five seconds or 10s. Make sure that if you’re leaving your area, make sure that you are locking your computer, even if it’s going to the bathroom or going over to a colleague’s desk. Lock your computer. Be careful what you click on, right, because people are your greatest risk. Sure, if you walk around on a Friday at like 4:00, you see something like this, right? They probably just clicked. They should have clicked on. Right? Like, damn it, you know, now they have to make the decision. Do I tell somebody or do I just close the computer? And hopefully when I come in on Monday, it’s all fixed, right? Close the computer. Right. That’s what we do.
Speaker3: If so, yeah. So if you see weird emails and you know that they don’t look right, you can see like characters, these weird looking information, what do you do? What should you do with those or should you do anything.
Jason Price: So in my organization if we get those we actually we have a program where we send it to them so we don’t open it, we don’t click on it, whatever. But by doing that, it makes the whole company aware. And it goes on to the master list. But it’s a little bit different. I typically know which emails I want to click on and anything else. No, unfortunately, I just don’t click on it. Whether I don’t even click on it to see or hover over it. Like, I don’t know if it’s a person. I don’t know why they’re emailing me, I’m just going to delete it and move past it. I don’t typically.
Speaker3: Interact with it.
Jason Price: I don’t interact because like, like like Kyle said, like sometimes you can hover over it and that can trigger something. I just yeah, that’s just me though. Some people will do the whole quarantine thing and do this or the other. I mean, I just don’t know this person. Don’t know this person. You know this person. Okay. I’m expecting I know this person. We interact and click on that and that’s fine. Good to go.
Speaker3: I just wonder what the best thing to do. Like if you it or just I don’t open it, you know what I mean?
Jason Price: It really depends like the only time it’s really recording is like me. You like a company network, you typically record it and then it will investigate it and sometimes they’ll say, nope, this is a legit email and say. Other times they’ll just put it on like a blacklist so that things from that evil can’t come through again. So they’ll do stuff like that. Okay.
Speaker3: Thanks.
Jason Price: Um, let me see this. Antivirus and malware protection. Right? Obviously, once again, from the 80s, we needed something. Set a core belief that we know in terms of protecting ourselves, getting antivirus on a computer, mobile device policy. More and more people are working off of their phones, right? You’re in a supermarket now getting emails you’re responding to set together. What type of policy do you guys have? Right. If you have it where your phone automatically locks after like 15 seconds? Or is it. Making sure that we’re responsible with that data. Security testing and configuration. So making sure that you have somebody consistently checking your network. And you know, things change on networks all the time, making sure that it’s being monitored rather than just thinking it’s good until you have an issue. And so this right. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Right. And so I look at this as probably one of the most important statements ever. I’m sure he didn’t mean it to be as impactful as it is to me now. But when it comes to preparing for a disaster, preparing for these sorts of events, right. You have to keep getting a punch in the face, right? You can’t say, I’m going to set, set it. I’m gonna set up my network. I’m gonna make sure that I have this program, I have this I’m good to go and not practice.
Jason Price: What would happen if there was really a disaster situation? Right. You need to make sure that you’re consistently running tests. But yeah. So you want to make sure that, you know, as it pertains to like your network, that you are consistently identifying changes that you are, you know, consistently updating, you know, who the go to people for and that they handle certain parts of the network. You know, having an incident response plan, right, is great, but it’s not good if you don’t take the appropriate measures to make sure you prepare for the actual execution of utilizing incident response support. Stay on top of new tech. And continuity is big. You know, as Kyle mentioned, backup backup backup backup backup. That’s what this is right here. We call it continuity because backup you have your data, but you don’t necessarily have the ability to instantly with its continuity continuity. You have your data and it can be spun up and utilized instantly. Right. So that’s the big change. Right? So that’s a lot. You know, if you don’t know where to begin or the next steps, you know Roland’s about to come up and you know have a conversation. And he’s like the go to person. Right. And I’m happy that he was able to bring me here to share my experiences and hopefully educate you guys somewhat. But you know, Roland, thank you. Thank you.
Roland Parker: I know it’s mid-afternoon. You guys have been here a while. All this technology jargon, does it make sense? So I’m going to try and just try and wrap it up. And what affects your industry specifically and what you should be looking for. Very quick introduction. We’re going to do the introduction. Go to our team. And then the top six things that you should really be looking at for CPA firms. One do you guys all know about Compliancy and how it impacts you so that if you were to get compromised and your customer’s data was exposed, then as CPAs, you could be held liable. So those were the FTC regulations that came out of June. So you should be aware of them. And you should be making sure that you yourselves and your firms are compliant while CPA targets, while the big targets are hackers, obviously, holding your data to ransom peoples, you’ve got everybody’s personal identifiable information. Why transfer fraud using your emails to scam customers? If they compromised your email, they could get all of your customers emails. They can infect your machine for a virus and then offer to clean it up, which you should never do because they’re going to be the bad guys. And then your business is going to be held liable if your customer’s information is exposed.
Roland Parker: So then now making sure that CPAs take extra effort to protect your company, that this is part of our team. And as we’ve seen in a lot of the other sites, cybercrime is rocking. So we know it’s in the billions of dollars. There’s big incentive for people to go after the data. So there’s six things that you want to really look at your access control, encryption, multi-factor authentication, information disposal. You can’t just get rid of your computer monitoring activity and having a reliable security. Those six factors are the things that if you don’t do it, not only could you lose access to your information, but you’re also going to be held liable. So those are the FTC regulations to send somebody in your company who’s got to be designated to supervise your information security. You’ve got to conduct a risk assessment, design and implement safeguards, have your system monitored staff training, monitor your service providers, keep your information security camera and create a written incident response plan. Most people haven’t even started doing an incident response plan. And that’s what both OSHA and the FBI were saying. Have that written down and make sure that you know what to do should a disaster, should a ransomware attack.
Roland Parker: And they also say that a qualified individual should be able to report that to your directors. So security and backups big thing we’ve seen. So your environment and it becomes more difficult as people now work from home. But typically you would have a firewall followed by a zero trust program, then a next gen antivirus. I’m going to cover that in a bit more information and an email phishing defense program. Why is it so important? Well, number one way that people are getting hacked business email compromise. If you don’t have security system around your email, that’s the number one way that you’re going to be hit. And the chances are if you’ve got no way of being alerted when somebody in your email system, the chances are the bad guys are sitting there and they could be just sitting and lurking. Whether you’re a one man band, whether you’re a 2000 person organization, all they’re looking for is somebody to respond to a text, to click on a link, and next minute they’re in your email and they just sitting and lurking. Performing a pen test. So if you’ve got a bigger organization, you should have a pen test to ensure that your company’s network is secure.
Speaker5: Interesting question. There are companies that allow employees to to use their email address for personal things. And you know, I think that’s just a bad thing too, you know.
Roland Parker: Yeah. So you can have. You shouldn’t be. What’s even worse is when companies say you can use your company email on your home computer.
Speaker6: Some companies.
Speaker5: Let people do.
Speaker3: That.
Roland Parker: So they say you’ve got a personal device, you’ve got a cell phone, you’ve got a laptop. Well, just respond to emails on your on your personal device. But that personal device is no security.
Speaker5: That’s that’s right. Because I was just talking to my daughter. She got a new job and I said, are they going to send you a phone? And she said, no, I’m going to just use my personal phone.
Roland Parker: So that’s a problem.
Speaker3: That’s a problem.
Roland Parker: That’s a personal device with zero security and there’s no way of tracking. And then you click on it, it takes that exposes your email password. And the guys have got your email address and they’re in your system. And forcing password changes. We’ve heard everybody talking about that. And they should be changed regularly. And they should be complex. More long than necessary, just complex, but longer. Having regularly employee training. We went to a cyber security conference with Robert Hertzberg from Shark Tech. We went to see multi-billion dollar cyber security company. Number one, weakness is always the employee. So if you’re not doing employee training, that’s the number one way of people getting hacked. Look at MGM. I mean, they they basically took somebody’s LinkedIn profile and used that to chat to somebody. And it gave them the password to get into the system. Millions of dollars plus reputation. Having your secure backups offsite and local and the ability to spin up a lot of backups are just backups of data. And that’s what we’re talking about. Can you how quickly can you restore if it’s just the data? Now you’ve got to reinstall your operating system, your programs. You could be down for days or a week instead of being back up and running.
Speaker4: On the previous slide, we’ve had the automated phishing defense program. Is that the the email filtering tool or in an inbound outbound or is that something else?
Roland Parker: Yeah. So the program we we use is Graphis. There’s a few out there. So it’s an AI based email filtering. So it’s going to take it’s going to detect if there’s any malicious content in that email. It blocks it completely if it’s not malicious. But it could be spoofing. So as Kyle from the FBI was talking where people added an AI or they put a capital I instead of an L, or they put an extra N or change it to a zero. Now what’s going to happen? You’re going to get a banner that comes across that says you’ve never received an email from this person, but you go, well, wait a minute, we’ve got 20 emails and we’ve got email correspondence. How can it say I’ve never received? And that alerts you? This is somebody trying to spoof that email. It says it’s coming from your boss, but it’s actually they’ve spoofed the email address that’s going to let you know it’s got this big banner. And that’s when you can say Marcus phishing. And once you do that, it’s going to take it from the back end stops you from seeing those emails again. So now we move on to zero trust. A lot of what you’ve heard is where programs have run on your computers, because people have got a traditional antivirus program. What is an antivirus program? Do it looks at what are things as known threats.
Roland Parker: And then if the system gets infected, it tries to fight against that program that is being installed. Zero trust goes it from a different angle. It basically says, I’m going to take your computer. I’m going to whitelist these programs and everything else I’m going to treat as. It’s not going to allow anything else to run apart from your known good programs. So what happens is that we put the system into learning mode. It runs for a while, learns your programs, then we lock it down. If you click on a link or an attachment by mistake, it just says this program. Install contract. So you’re not trying to fight against it. It just says zero trust. You’re not going to allow it to run. Now, if you need to install a new program, then you simply say put it into learning mode, let it run, and then you lock it down. So zero trust is becoming the new way that everybody should have of going beyond the firewall. I want Zero trust to be my number one thing to protect. What it also has is a thing called ring fencing. And why is ring fencing important? Ring fencing is important because it says a known good program tries to do something that it shouldn’t. So in other words, yes word, yes PDF is a legitimate program.
Roland Parker: But why is that PDF document that I open trying to run an executable script? In other words, it’s trying to run a program. A lot of the bad guys now are sending attachments to Excel spreadsheets, word documents, PDF, you think, well, this is a PDF document. How can that hurt to open? The script is embedded into that PDF. As soon as you open it, it’s going to start running. And that’s where the ring fencing comes in and says, you know what, you’re a whitelisted program that’s been allowed, but you’re not allowed to run this executable. We’re going to block that whitelisted program from from doing that bad thing. So it’s important to have a combination of whitelisting or listing and then ring fencing. And then your elevation control is really just when you’re saying if you’ve got you can actually put in a combination of elevation control, network access control, where you can actually say, unless this program has got it running. So if somebody gets your credentials, unless both sides can actually see it, it’s going to stop that program from running. And then storage control is just so that employees, you can block it down where employees don’t copy things onto your thumb drives that they shouldn’t be copying. So it’s not really outside malicious hacker, but it’s more from an internal effect of I don’t want people copying into thumb drives, but you also don’t want if a hacker got into your system being up, being able to upload your documents to the cloud.
Roland Parker: So storage control works for that. So you everybody in this day and age knows about antivirus. So your traditional antivirus only knows the things that it knows. Is it something called zero? Zero day virus. And what happens is when a virus is released, guess what the bad guy, the the bad guys released the virus. The good guys say a new virus is we’re going to try and find out something about it. And then they try try and write the antidote to prevent that from running. But there’s always that window of opportunity that you can get infected. So the next gen antivirus is actually learning and intelligently starting to block that. And then. As my friend from Csail was pointing out, the detection and response and the proactive threat hunting, endpoint detection and remediation, if you don’t have. A next gen antivirus with endpoint detection and remediation, and a 24/7 security operations center, you’re going to be vulnerable. Because if somebody gets past those defenses, what’s going to happen if files start changing? Your antivirus is already compromised. It’s too late. The endpoint detection and remediation means wait a minute, these files are changing the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to isolate that computer.
Roland Parker: We’re going to stop this, this from spreading. And then we can come in and remediate on it, clean it up, get you back up and running. But if you don’t have that on a 24/7 basis, monitoring your system, then guess what? You wake up the next morning. If you if your antivirus programs have been compromised and you don’t have that detection and remediation, you come in Monday morning. All your all your files are encrypted, encrypted, and they’re basically going to be holding you to ransom. And at that point you hope and we are hoping my backup works. So this is that advanced email program that we were talking about. The one we use is graphics. It’s a Casio product. And basically what it’s going to do is that is going to take everything off the back end. This is the dashboard that we can see that we’ll share with. That’s going to let you know how many phishing attempts. And it’s basically taking all of the malicious stuff, getting rid of it. But if you then marking something as suspicious or malicious, then it also you training the system to say this is suspicious. Nobody in the company should be seeing it. Get rid of it.
Speaker5: So who would who would the company would see? That’s me.
Roland Parker: So typically what you’re going to see from an end user point of view is that you’re going to see a banner that comes across when you get an unknown email coming in that you that you haven’t seen it, or it could be suspicious. Now on the back end, we get those alerts and then we share those reports with management at the end of the month to say, this is what’s happened for this month and, and this is how effective the system is working. And we can also see then if you’re under more of an attack. So that alerts us to wait a minute. Somebody’s deliberately trying to compromise the system. We’re seeing an increase in attacks.
Speaker3: Thank you.
Roland Parker: Access control. You know, this is something that the FTC are forcing, making sure that you’ve got an inventory of your system, password changes are enforced, and removing employee access when they do. You know how many companies forget to remove employees access from their Colonial Pipeline? How they got hacked? Was that an X employees credentials had been exposed on the dark web, and the guys actually got into the system using an X employee because the IT guys didn’t shut off their system. Hundreds of millions of dollars that it cost him simply because X employees weren’t removed. The access wasn’t removed. And then zero trust application that we discussed and encryption as CPAs. If you’ve got any information on your laptops, you should have your you should have BitLocker encryption enabled. If you don’t if somebody steals your laptop, your average windows password can be cracked in minutes. The average IT guy can run some software and you’ll be in your machine. Having a windows password is not secure. You’ve got to have BitLocker encryption because otherwise you you are going to be held accountable when that data gets lost. So. The great thing with Threatlocker as well we get stolen. We can actually lock it down. Using encrypted emails when you’re sending information. And typically you never seen any personally identifiable information via email should all be done in a portal. If you send it by email, it’s got to be encrypted. Because even if you’ve got a secure email system, if they’re using Yahoo, Gmail, even your regular Microsoft 365. It’s not encrypted. It’s going to be exposed. So don’t let people send you tax returns or tax documents, social Security numbers, anything you’ve got no personal identifiable information shouldn’t be no email.
Roland Parker: Upload your documents to a secure portal with multifactor authentication. You know, we’ve discussed that too. For text to your cell phone is not becoming sufficient anymore. The bad guys are getting around that. It’s got to be multi-factor authentication, and that’s something to think about even with your bank account. So when you go to your bank and you’re logging into your online banking, does it send a multi-factor authentication code to your phone or does it allow you to log in, or does it only allow you to do it once? So the problem is people log into their banks if their computer gets compromised, even if they had multi-factor authentication. But it said trust this device, the computer gets compromised. The bank guys own your system. They’ve got into your bank account. Now, we did have one case small pool builder that came in. They saved their passwords in Chrome. Chrome got compromised. The bad guys got the password to the bank. Good thing is that they had two factor authentication. On the on the bank account. The bad thing is, when the bad guys try to log in, it said two factor authentication codes. So you know what they did. They spoofed region’s bank account, and they phoned the person on their phone and said region’s. They answered it and the hackers said to him, we phoning from the bank. We’ve noticed unusual activity. We need to verify that you are the legitimate person who owns this account. We’re going to send you a code.
Roland Parker: Give us that code and we’re going to verify that it’s you. They gave him the code. They then said, okay, looks like everything’s fine. You can go in and win. But what they didn’t realize is that that just given the hackers the two, and they gave the code and the guys got into the system and they went in and they transferred $24,000 out of they noticed it. It was Monday morning and the money was gone. So again, any time that these transactions, financial transactions really got to be suspicious, if somebody is fining you from the bank, it’s better to say, I’m going to phone the bank back and verify it. In addition to that, go into your bank account and make sure. Security center. I want to be alerted anytime a credit card transaction occurs. Anytime money leaves my bank account, I want to know because if something were to be was to happen, you can get hold of the bank. You can stop it. If you wait for a couple of days and you don’t notice it straight away, it may be too late. So that’s just not just something for you guys, but also your clients to realize. Put those controls in place. Make sure that every time you log in to the bank, you have to generate code. It’s a pain in the butt, but you got to do it. Every time somebody leaves the bank account, every time a credit card transaction occurs, get a text message. That way, the quicker you know about these things, the quicker the bank can actually get the funds returned.
Speaker3: Good question.
Speaker5: Let’s say the bank is happening with my bank, which is a big large bank, and they send me messages to create the multifactor authentication. But I’m lazy or I don’t want to have a two step thing. If something happens to my account, can they say, we told you to have a multifactor authenticate? We recommended and you didn’t do it.
Speaker3: Yeah. Use it against you or.
Speaker5: Something that can help me against. Yeah. So, yeah.
Roland Parker: To some extent, personal accounts have got more protection than business accounts. Oh, really? So sometimes you can say this was a personal account. Business accounts is very little protection. But everybody says multifactor is a pain. I don’t want to do all these steps. That’s that’s just the environment we live. If you don’t do it, sooner or later, something’s going to happen. It’s better to spend a few more minutes each day having security and being competent or being compromised in the money. Thank you so much. Spectral authentication. Whether it’s QuickBooks, accessing your servers, SharePoint, any time you accessing data for multi-factor authentication, and then when it comes to your information disposal TCR pushing it. Never just dispose of your of your computers. Have your hard drives shredded or smashed. If you’re a bigger company, you often have to have a certificate that it was disposed of correctly, but the hackers will go through if you just send your. If you just dispose of old laptops on computers, that’s when your data could be could be exposed. Have procedures in place, obviously shred sensitive documents. And then in the hybrid environment we’re working, sometimes in an office it’s easier to control these things. How do you control it when people are working from home. But that’s where you’ve got to have a company policy. You’ve got to shred your documents, you’ve got to shred your hard drives, cannot have information on your own. And then dark web monitoring, we actually offer dark web monitoring to our clients as part of this. If you’re interested. If you. We can’t do it for Gmail and Yahoo or we can’t do it if you’ve got a company where we can run a free dark web scan for you.
Roland Parker: What that’s going to tell you is, is your information on the dark web. So inside one of the folders, we’ve got a flyer that has the option to do a dark web scan. We can run that for you at no cost. So you’ve just got to scan the QR code. We can also do a free pen test if you want, but the dark web scan is going to be, you know, is your information on the dark web. Now, can you get rid of it over the dark web? Not not so easy, but what you can do if your information is on the dark web, if you’ve got a password that you’re currently using and you know you’ve been compromised and you can put things into place to change it, instead of waiting for the bad guys to actually do because the chances are the bad guys are in your system already. Now what you’ve got to do is get them booted out. And that would be, hey, wait a minute, my email has been compromised. Change your password and then log into your control center to see. Hey, wait a minute. They’ve had access to the back end, and that’s where they put in forwarding rules, deletion rules to stop you from knowing that they’ve been sitting in the system. So the dark web scan is really important. Checking activity. Threat blockers, storage control. That’ll also let us know if somebody is trying to upload or download things that we shouldn’t be doing.
Roland Parker: And computer files should be monitored with endpoint detection and remediation backed by that 24/7. So if your company doesn’t do that, or if it’s something that you should inquire about, why do I have cyber security insurance to do? I have endpoint detection remediation and do I have 24/7 up monitoring it should something happen and your organization should be monitored by somebody that’s able to track anything that’s going wrong, because the last thing you want to do is wait until Monday morning to discover being hit with ransomware, and everything’s been shut down. What do we do now? You never want to be in that situation and we see it all the time. We’ve seen CPA firms, and the increase in attacks on CPA firms over the last couple of years has been rampant. So be aware, know that you are under attack and stop putting things in place to protect yourself. So basically, in conclusion, start taking proactive steps and do this table topic exercise. What is a table top exercise. It’s really sitting down with the it guys and going what happens in the case of a ransomware attack? What is going to happen in the case of a flood? What should happen if the whole place burns down? The tabletop exercise really takes you through those high catastrophic ideas. Put procedures in place and then test them. So I know it’s been a long day, but I thank you all for attending. Do we have any questions?
Speaker3: More likely.
Speaker6: Than not. Right.
Roland Parker: Why so? So the thing is, when you send an email, it’s going through 3 or 4 different servers before it gets to the individual. So emails can be intercepted. Secondly, if you’re sending an email to somebody who’s got a Yahoo! If Yahoo servers of compromise, which then can compromise many times over the past years, then the bad guys got it. So the only way to make sure it’s secure is by sending an encrypted email. So you’ve got to have a higher level Microsoft account like an E three account, not your standard or basic account that enables encryption. And then you can send the encryption that way. It’s only when the person on the other side then receives it that he can get it. But emails, it’s just not it’s it’s not a secure way of sending any information.
Speaker6: When you send a good email, they only last three months. They don’t keep it for long. So you want to go back and look at previous conversations. There isn’t any information you.
Speaker3: Anyway.
Speaker6: Talk to you. You don’t get that.
Roland Parker: Sure. But again, it’s all. How sensitive is it? So if you’re looking at a general not to work. But if I’m going to be sending. Bank account information, social security numbers, credit card information, I wouldn’t use email at all. Get people to upload it. Tax documents. Get them to upload.
Speaker6: Right. But there’s a.
Speaker3: Lot of times you.
Speaker6: Ask questions and they’ll respond.
Speaker3: Always either body of the email content. Okay. So so.
Speaker6: So do you recommend using.
Roland Parker: Encrypted emails is the best.
Speaker3: All right.
Roland Parker: So if you want to sign up for the dog scan go ahead and do it. We also offer a free pen case. And if you’re interested in your firm having compliancy we can do that as well. So in other words, the FTC regulations that come up if you’re not sure what they mean, if you’re not sure what it means to be compliant, we can actually run those compliance programs for you and make sure that you’re complying. All right. Thanks, everybody.
Speaker3: Thanks.