At this time, we don’t know who is behind the attacks. Due to the sophistication, it’s safe to assume we are not dealing with bored kids in their mom’s basement. There is a possibility that this is state sponsored cyber warfare, which brings me to my next point: things are heating up between the U.S. and Russia over allegations of hacking. The White House announced on Friday that they were working on plans to engage in cyber warfare with Russia (they have not yet said if they would carry out such plans.)

In short, if they do carry out plans and there is a cyber war between Russia and the United States, there is very little we can do as small businesses to protect ourselves. The level of equipment and monitoring required to stop a state sponsored hack attempt would be more than any small businesses would ever want to spend. If they want in, they are going to get in. If it comes to this, Russia would look to disable Internet for as many businesses as possible to put a strain on our economy. They may even attempt to penetrate our firewalls and delete all of our data (further crippling the private sector.) This could be done a number of ways, either through a hack or by spreading of a new type of virus.

Because of this, your business’ best line of defense right now is your backup systems. If things actually escalate into a cyber war, you should be prepared with an offline copy of all your data. Implementing an offline backup would be different for every business, but one simple solution would be backing up a complete archive of all data to a portable hard drive and then unplugging the USB cable.

Please contact our offices if you have any questions.

James Watt, President