“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.” ~ John Wyndham,  The Day of the Triffids


A big thank you to everyone who reached out to me and wished me well last month.  Your love and support, of me and my rantings, was incredibly encouraging.  THANK YOU!!

July was mostly uneventful.  My recovery continued, and I’m officially “back to normal”, whatever that means!

My Cyber insurance is getting more demanding.  For instance, they are requiring all backups be kept off-network and they are requiring the use of 2-Factor Authentication.

Let’s talk about why they are requiring this and why you should care.  I’ll start with why you should care:

It’s easy to believe you are too small for hackers to bother you.  It’s easy to believe you have nothing of value.  But the truth is:  Hackers see you as easy prey.  You might not have thousands of employees personal data, numerous bank accounts, or trade secrets, but you are low hanging fruit.  You are a quick and easy $5000.  Pretend you are the hacker.  If you can collect on 10 or 20 small ransoms, that’s a nice payday. Why work harder and longer to break into a larger organization?  You can make the same amount money, and possibly more, by doing the quick and easy jobs.

My cyber insurance  company knows small businesses are low hanging fruits.  Experience has taught them that ransomware has become more sophisticated and powerful.  In the good old days, ransomware would muck up your hard drive.  Now it has the capability to muck up your hard drive,  any attached external drive, take over the network and muck up your life!  It looks for the locally attached backup drive.  Keeping your backups unattached from the network is crucial to surviving an attack.

Keeping your backups unattached from the network is also a pain in the rear.  It means you have to remember to plug them in, wait for the backup to complete and then unplug them.  That’s a lot of man handling and during the business of life, skipping a backup or two becomes common and possibly catastrophic. 

Backup automation to the rescue!  Yes,  you have to pay for automation.  But it is WAY CHEAPER  than paying a ransom.  And it’s easy to setup.  Comp-U-Talk has partnered with three off-site backup vendors.  All three meet the requirements for cyber insurance offsite backups.  Each is tailored to specific backup needs.  Pricing can start as low as $30/month. 

It’s easy math: paying $30/month for offsite backup for 156 months (aka 13 years)  is less expensive than paying one $5000 ransom.  If you’re not using offsite backup, CALL ME.

Stay Safe,  Stay Healthy, and Stop Dropping Cookies

~Queen Janet
(I’m really liking my preferred pronoun: Queen)