Help Cut Down on Cybercrime

February 3, 2021 | By Guest Author

This blog is a guest post by industry partner Tim McLaurin who recently received his PhD in Cybersecurity from Marymount University.

It is projected that cybercrime will cost the world over $10.5 trillion dollars a year by 2025. The reported impacts of these attacks are becoming more and more common in the daily news cycle. Hospitals, local governments, federal governments, and major corporations are among those that are typically represented when the latest breach occurs. What is underrepresented are the impacts to the small and medium business. Cybercriminals operate with all of the efficiencies you would expect from a multi-trillion dollar industry. They frequently target the small to medium business because they are more likely to lack the proper protections and resources necessary to stop the attack. They are also more likely to pay a ransom because they cannot continue to survive without access to their data.

Small to medium businesses are the primary driver of the U.S. economy. They employ 99% of Americans and contribute more than 50% of the GDP. Yet 60% of small businesses are forced to close after a ransomware attack. Cybercriminals are a threat to your business as well as the US economy as a whole. Few business owners have the resources necessary to make sure that all of the protections in place are sufficient enough to protect against the latest attack variant.

There are several security frameworks in place that are designed to help small to medium businesses. However, they are not written in a way to help enable the business owner to implement the protections. The language is either not specific enough or forces the business to filter through tomes of text to find what is applicable to them. They do not take into account how you operate or that your time is dedicated to servicing your customers. An effective security framework needs to be more tailored to your environment and facilitate your ability to focus your energy on issues that matter most to you.

To create such a framework, we must deepen our understanding of your operational environment and priorities. I am inviting you to participate in a research study that seeks to mitigate the majority of cybercriminals’ tools and tactics they use to exploit your business. Your participation would be completing an anonymous 15-minute survey. The focus is on improving the effectiveness of the tools that already exist in your environment to enhance your security posture. The framework will be designed to operate within your constraints and focus on utilizing the resources that are available to you in the protection of your environment. Upon completion the research will be made available to you, helping to improve your position in protecting against adversaries.

Thank you in advance for your participation and I hope that we can make a real difference in combatting cybercrime.

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