Every successful cyberattack depends on two people – the hacker, and someone on the inside. That’s the bit that should terrify you: someone in your organisation is going to enable an attack on your computer network.
It could be someone careless, or poorly trained, or working under pressure to tight deadlines. It could be someone with a grudge against your organisation. Or it could even be someone who only occasionally accesses your network to submit holiday requests. They are all a risk to your organisation.
The skilled hacker knows how to exploit everyone, all they need is a foothold in your system. Once they’re in they can poke around and look for weaknesses to exploit. That’s why even someone with the lowest level of access who only occasionally logs-on can unwittingly be a security risk.
Having breached your security, the hackers, because there will likely be a team of them as soon as one has got in, will take their time to poke around your entire network. They’ll be cracking passwords as required to access secure data, download personal data on your employees, download key customer data, and any commercially confidential information they can find. When they think they’ve found as much useful information as they can, they will leave you with one final unpleasant gift. They will encrypt essential files and leave a ransom demand.
Bringing your organisation to its knees
The network cannot operate because critical files are not available, and you have a huge challenge to get everything back up and running. Now you’ll find out whether your disaster recovery procedures are up to the task. Meanwhile, all that information the hackers downloaded will go on sale on the “dark web”. There it will be bought by criminals who will apply for bank loans or credit cards in the names of your employees. That will give them financial headaches for years afterwards. Or if the customer data included credit card information, they can go on a massive spending spree. That will give your customers nightmare problems to resolve.
Whether or not you pay the ransom, the hackers can still make a fortune out of your organisation. Or lack of organisation. Because to go back to what I wrote at the outset: “every successful cyberattack depends on two people – the hacker, and someone on the inside.” Have you given that aspect as much attention as it warrants?
That unpleasant ‘gift’ the hackers left for you continues to keep on giving. As well as struggling to recover from the ransomware aspect of the attack, you must also decide who to tell. You will be legally obliged to report a breach of personnel data to your data protection authority. And assuming it’s not painfully obvious that you’ve been hacked, you really ought to inform your employees and customers. If you don’t tell them, or you try to cover it up, it’s likely to become public knowledge anyway when the authorities fine you for allowing a serious data breach.
You think people are your biggest asset? Security-wise they’re your biggest liability.