InsideOutdoor | WINTER 2022 19 said OSI executive vice president, Tori Hoeschler. “The average cost of each attack to the business was $136,000. Of those without proper security measures, data backup or proper insurance, over 60 percent were out of business within six months.” For businesses in the outdoor space, critical time can be lost when their operations are out of commission, especially if the attack goes down during the peak season. To address these concerns, OSI has outlined a series of recommended measures to help keep any mom-and-pop shop safe and profitable for years to come. 1. Knowing and Managing Data Today’s organization needs to understand not just the nature of at-risk data but the calamity that its breach would cause. Organizations need to be cognizant of the types of data that they collect and store, factoring in their own depth of resources for keeping this information safe. 2. Backing Up Files All effort should be made to schedule regular – often automated – informational backups. “Today, a business is 10 times more likely to experience a cyber event than they are to have any other sort of insurance claim,” Hoeschler noted. “It’s reasonable to say that when it comes to an attack, it’s not a question of if, but when.” The executive also noted that backups and encryption should be applied to “all data on a network, even if it’s not private data.” 3. Training Staff to Recognize Cyber-Attack Methods Whether your company has one employee at a cash register or thousands sprawled out across a geographically dispersed area, the concept of keeping information safe can rely on the choices that they make. “These criminals are so savvy,” said Martin. “There’s a lot of different places to access somebody’s system. It could be as simple as a directory or the phishing emails. It happens probably once a month at our company where I get a notification of ‘Do not click on this link.’ Some of them are easy to see through and some of them are really quite well designed, where I feel like that is a legitimate request in an email for me to click on a link and look at something.” 4. Conducting Employee Background Checks OSI recommends having a good grasp of exactly who sits at one’s desk. By weeding out those with a criminal or even questionable past, the organization is able to limit the risk of ill-natured attacks from within. 5. Limiting Critical System Access For many small businesses, common practices such as password sharing run rampant. This dangerous policy grants anyone access who happens to get the proper login credentials, whether due to legitimate or illegitimate means. This is where concepts such as “zero trust” and MFA (multi-factor authentication) come into play. The idea is to restrict access to sensitive information exclusively to those for whom its access is inherently necessary to do their jobs, while also requiring additional validation for every user login. “The primary pushback we get from our clients when we recommend the use of MFA across their network is the cost of installing and integrating it,” said Hoeschler. “Data suggests that email is the primary point of vulnerability for businesses. We encourage starting
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