North Bay IT professionals share tips for preventing business cyberattacks

How can North Bay businesses fight against a cyberattack?

A panel of experts discussed strategies business leaders can take to protect their companies from being hacked during the Business Journal’s 2021 virtual Cybersecurity Conference, held Tuesday.

Robert Boles, founder and president of Larkspur-based cybersecurity firm Blokworx, said one of the fundamental steps a business can take is to create complex passwords. He recommended using a password-management service, such as Bitwarden or Dashlane.

Nothing, however, is foolproof, so it’s critical businesses be proactive about protecting their network, he said.

“The consequence of doing nothing is that most likely you're not going to exist,” Boles said. “Statistically, (about) 83% of small- and midsize businesses that experience a breach don't recover.”

Brian Rober, senior vice president and chief information officer at Exchange Bank, recommended hiring a cybersecurity firm to manage threat detection and prevention.

There also is advanced technology to help ward off bad actors.

“The signature-based systems are going away, and we're moving to a real-time artificial intelligence type of network,” Rober said. Artificial intelligence-based tools can monitor a network and will lock it down immediately if any abnormal activity is detected.

Everyday emails also continue to be problematic, so continuing to educate employees about something as simple as not routinely clicking on a link is critical, Rober said.

In fact, Rober argues that employers don’t need to provide all employees with an email address.

“Most of the time, you can use certain chat functions or chat programs for internal communication,” he said.

Rober also shared his experience working for a managed service provider a few years ago.

“We would manage 100 million emails a year, and 97 million of those emails never even made it to our clients’ email server,” he said. “They got dropped just because they were complete spam garbage, not even questionable ones. So the majority of emails floating around out in the world are not legit.”

It can get expensive for business owners to put every possible tool into their networks to protect against a cyberattack, the panelists said, but it’s not all doom and gloom.

“It’s a battle that is very difficult because there’s a huge financial gain on the other side from the bad actors, but I still believe in the good guy and we can make a difference,” Rober said. “I can tell you there's a lot of breaches not going down as well. They just never hit the news.”

Comcast Business was the major sponsor for the Cybersecurity Conference, and Exchange Bank was the underwriter. The conference is available on demand through Jan. 31, 2022, at nbbj.news/cyber21.