The IT Nerd

By Penny Garbus

Every day, businesses across the country hum along efficiently, their operations supported by enormous reams of data that most employees – and bosses – take for granted.

Need to check inventory? Want to make sure a customer paid a bill? That information and much more is stored somewhere in a computer, always at the ready in time of need.

Except when it’s not.

Sometimes things go awry – a hacker, a system crash – that cause a business to lose critical data, and that can be devastating to the bottom line. Worst-case scenario: The business goes out of business.

“If you’re a business owner and you’ve not thought of data in relation to your financial well-being, don’t feel bad; you’re not alone,” says Penny Garbus, co-founder of Soaring Eagle Consulting Inc. (www.SoaringEagle.guru) and co-author of Mining New Gold – Managing your Business Data.

“Sometimes people are so busy running their businesses that they don’t have time to worry about the bits and bytes of their data and how relevant it is to longevity of their business.”

But they should, she says. Without data protection processes and procedures in place, the business could face serious consequences.

Garbus says data is like gold: It can be traded, it’s the base for creation of products, and if you lose it, you lose money.

Here are just three ways in which a failure to secure data can prove costly to a business:

• Impact on sales. A sales team may be so dependent on data to do its job that a breach could mean sales goals aren’t met. That in turn affects the bottom line of the company. The longer it takes to reconstruct the data, the more money is lost.
• Lawsuits and fines. Sometimes regulatory agencies require that certain records be kept. If a business loses that information, it could face potential fines or lawsuits. “Lawsuits and regulatory agencies can make your life a nightmare if you fail to understand, develop and follow processes that protected regulated data,” Garbus says. Customers also could sue if a system malfunction causes a business to fail to live up to a contract.

• Ransomware. On occasion, malicious hackers infect your computers with software that blocks access to everything until you pay a ransom. “The ransoms are usually $1,000 and most companies pay the money,” Garbus says. Unfortunately, even paying a ransom is no guarantee a company’s data will be freed because on occasion the perpetrators demand even more money, she says. The situation can get even worse. “Sometimes the attacker has so completely destroyed data files and infected hard drives that they are unable to get the data back,” Garbus says. “The cost can run into thousands or even millions of dollars to get the company up and running again.”

“Any business that hasn’t already done so should begin a self-analysis to design data protection processes and procedures,” Garbus says. “You need to define your needs and then talk with your IT staff to ensure that the data recovery and protection strategies match those needs.

“But remember that this is not an insurmountable problem. If you take the right steps you can save yourself a lot of costs and headaches down the road.”

About Penny Garbus

Penny Garbus, co-founder of Soaring Eagle Consulting Inc. (www.SoaringEagle.guru), is co-author of Mining New Gold – Managing Your Business Data. She has been working in the data-management field since leaving college when she worked as a data entry clerk for Pitney Bowes Credit. She later ran the training and marketing department of Northern Lights Software.

Cisco’s Talos Intelligence Group is sounding the alarm about a new type of malware called VPNFilter. The malware contains a killswitch for routers, can steal logins and passwords and can monitor industrial control systems. And an attack would have the potential to cut off internet access for all the devices connected to the router. Ukraine seems to be particularly hard hit, which combined with what has been discovered about the malware, implies that this is Russian in origin.

Routers from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear and TP-Link are affected. Netgear has suggested to users everywhere to upgrade the firmware on their routers. Nobody else seems to have any specific advice for users of their products. Which is of course bad.

In terms of protecting yourself, here’s the best that from Cisco’s Talos Intelligence group:

• Users of SOHO routers and/or NAS devices reset them to factory defaults and reboot them in order to remove the potentially destructive, non-persistent stage 2 and stage 3 malware.

And that’s pretty much all the average end user can do. Hopefully more robust advice comes in the days ahead as this is far from trivial.

The Washington Post is reporting that the FBI who aren’t fans of encrypted smarphones provided Congress with “grossly inflated” statistics on the number of electronic devices it has been been unable to access due to encryption:

The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of the same phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.

And that my friends is a problem because the FBI used those numbers to argue that companies like Apple and Google need to either do away with encryption entirely or create “back doors” for law enforcement. Now the FBI still says that encryption is a problem that needs to be addressed, but they’re going to get few people buying into that after this bit of news.