TBD: Cybersecurity for Small and Medium Businesses 101

Have you been watching the news lately? If you have, I’m sure that you have seen endless reports about data breaches. Between cyber-warfare, data breaches, and ransomware, being at an all time high, how can you not? And while many nation states and large corporations are taking cybersecurity seriously, still less than 50% of SMBs are doing anything about cybersecurity at all. If you’re a small or medium business owner, and you aren’t doing much to protect your business from cyber-threats, I’m here to tell you that you should. But according to many recent surveys, SMBs are not taking cybersecurity seriously, because most of them don’t think that they will ever be a target. But will they? Cyber-attacks are no longer what they used to be when attackers needed to possess elite skills and therefore, those skills would only be used against high-value targets. That is no longer the case. Just as end-user and business technology has become faster, cheaper, and more advanced, so has the technologies that the cyber-criminals are using today. With more unskilled people now having access to advanced technologies that can be used for hacking, along with criminal “service providers” who provide services such as Ransomware-as-a-Service, or “Hackers for hire:, everyone has become a target.

This doesn’t mean that you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect your business. While there are numerous managed security service providers who can provide a high level of expertise, preparation against attacks, monitoring, response services, cyber-insurance, etc, that is not what this talk is about. You will leave this talk with a list of business cybersecurity best practices that you can begin implementing today, on your own at little or no cost. The goal of this presentation is to help everyone become a little bit more secure that they are today. Education goes a long way.

So come join us for an educational day of cybersecurity learning.

Location and Date TBD

Robert Fernandes is the founder of Cyberchance, a 501c3 nonprofit organization in the Lehigh Valley. Robert is also the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a Financial Services organization in NJ. He has been in the Financial Industry for over 20 years. He recently started Cyberchance in order to provide quality cybersecurity education to underprivileged, inner-city teens.