I'm John Hill, CEO of TechSage Solutions here on the strategic planning deck. Again, cheers. Just a few days ago, the administration released a fact sheet titled Act Now to Protect Against Potential Cyberattacks in response to the evolving intelligence that Russia may be exploring options for potential attacks. We, as in TechSage Solutions have been seeing a huge surge in failed login attempts against Microsoft 365 email accounts from Russia and the surrounding areas. So in my opinion, cyber-attacks have begun and aren't just potential attacks any longer. The fact sheet indicated that since much of our nation's critical infrastructure is actually owned and operated by the private sector, it makes it necessary for the private sector to step up our game and protect the critical services we all rely on. I won't discuss all the steps mentioned in the fact sheet, but here are some of the most critical ones.

  1. We should mandate the use of multi-factor authentication on all of our systems to make it harder for attackers to access them.
  2. We should deploy modern security tools on all the computers and devices to continually look for and mitigate threats.
  3. You should check with your cybersecurity professionals to make sure that your systems are patched and protected against all known vulnerabilities and change passwords so that previously stolen credentials are useless to the bad actors.
  4. We should back up our data and ensure that we have offline backups beyond the reach of the malicious actors.
  5. We should really run exercises and drill our teams on the emergency plans so that we're prepared to respond quickly to minimize the impact of any potential attack.
  6. We should encrypt our data so that it can't be used for this stuff. And all of us should educate our employees on common tactics that attackers use that will use emails, and websites, encourage them to report their computers or phones have shown unusual behavior such as crashes or operating very slowly.

You know, I've been discussing these points with business owners and managers for several years, so I'm glad the administration is finally putting some focus on them.

If you'd like to schedule a short free consultation with me to discuss implementing any of these critical protections for your business, please go to www.techsagesolutions.com and click on the schedule button to make a schedule. If you'd like to take a look at my book about cybersecurity risk assessments, it can be purchased on Amazon. Let's talk soon. Until then, stay safe and try to avoid cybersecurity risks, although it's not easy to do these days. Thanks for joining me today for my thoughts from the deck. If you found it useful, please feel free to share it with your friends. Cheers.