October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and, although I’m glad it exists, a month’s focus on cybersecurity is hardly enough for an issue that can easily upend a business in a matter of moments. 

Ransomware hasn’t gone away. It has only gotten more insidious, smarter, and tougher to defeat. AI is part of that (and is certainly speeding things up for bad actors), but so is the oversight by so many businesses who aren’t yet doing everything they can to protect themselves. And when fraudsters get in, you have less and less time to address the threat before it impacts the organization with business interruption costs, reputational impacts, ransom exposure, and overall data loss. 

Ransomware hasn’t gone away because it pays big. Which means threat actors are highly committed to finding new, more efficient, and more effective ways into your info. A lot of really smart people choose the dark side, and they throw the full force of their intellect at finding a business’s weakness. They build and deploy malicious programs to thousands of targets a day. Maybe this one won’t catch you unaware, but what about the batch coming tomorrow or the next day?  

The propulsive development of AI as it relates to business email compromise (BEC) has made this process scarily effective. With just a moment on the phone or through public recordings, like conference footage or podcast appearances, AI can easily emulate the speech patterns of, say, Brian the CFO, who uncoincidentally is out of the country when “he” reaches out to Eric in accounting.  

Next thing you know, Eric is transferring funds to a hacker who sounded for all the world like the person he’s worked for since 2022.  

The bad actors did their homework to learn when the window of opportunity was and how best to exploit it. That’s what singular focus makes possible. Meanwhile Eric, who’s juggling 87 elements of the business every single day and who was sure that was truly Brian making the request, slips—just like thousands of other targets every single day.  

Pretend for a moment you were not diligently maintaining your cybersecurity protocols and constantly reinforcing best practices with your employees. Or—and this terrible possibility is quite real—pretend that the constant unlawful efforts of threat actors paid off for them with a breach. Say you get an alert at 10:17 p.m. the night before New Year’s Eve that a hacker has encrypted your data and backups and wants $1 million not to post your data, employee information, and customer contracts and their preferred pricing on the dark web.

You’re probably not going to make that party you’d been looking forward to, and that’s the least of your worries. The costs of not acting quickly and prudently—and did I mention quickly?—can be make all the difference to getting the business back to “normal.”

Whether you’re a global operation or a second-generation accounting firm, a ransomware attack is going to cause debilitating stress. For smaller companies without a lot of ready cash, the damage can be crushing. Clients who experience this come to us completely immobilized over what they need to do and typically don’t understand their real exposures. The emotional impact of a threat is overwhelming: You have no functional systems, can’t stop the impacts, and are losing money by the second while you try to get back online.

Where emotions are high and time is critical, knowing your team makes a big difference. We call this Cyber Quick Response, or CQR. We use it to make sure our clients are positioned to address an incident when it happens.  

We align a panel of providers with the carrier and the client—attorneys and forensic teams who are well familiar with all the relevant regulations and state laws and who know what to do to minimize the impact. We set up calls ahead of time with two options for each provider so clients can get to know who they might deal with and make decisions about the vendors they feel comfortable with, and from there we build an incident response plan (IRP). They know who to call in an emergency, and they already have a relationship with that person.  

Incidents like these represent so much more than a cyber claim. They’re about businesses that have been around maybe for generations or the community employer for most of the town. A lot of people don’t recognize that. Our goal at MJ was to create an environment that would make a difference for clients. These incidents aren’t personal for the hackers, but for our clients, they hit so much harder than a financial toll. We’re here to protect the assets, reputations, and frankly the hearts of the people we work with.  

We’d be happy to help you get your own team and response plan in place. Reach out today.