MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A partnership between Advantage Technology and the West Virginia Small Business Development Center will benefit small businesses around the state that may be struggling with keeping their assets secure.
“I’m very big on the education around cyber security,” said Chris May, an information security consultant for Advantage Technology on WAJR-Clarksburg’s “The Gary Bowden Show” last week. “My belief is that we can’t blame these major breaches on the users because we haven’t educated them properly.”
Advantage Technology and the WVSBDC have paired up to offer workshops for small businesses in W.Va. in order to help them become more aware of cyber security, scams, and people that may be trying to steal their information and/or assets. The workshops were the product of a conversation between Erica Bailey, director of WVSBDC and May. Bailey decided it was necessary to push information on cyber security to the community.
In previous years, corporations were the main focus for cyber criminals. But May said that focus has taken a shift.
“Things have changed drastically in that manner, though,” May said. “Where many small businesses believed they would never be a target, now they are.”
More often than not, small businesses lack the amount of protection from cyber criminals that larger corporations would have, making them an easier target for scams. Their level of unawareness to the issue is also a contributing factor.
“They do a target phishing campaign and take you to what looks like a login site for Facebook or for Google or for these other things,” May said. “You think ‘oh, I need to login to this to do whatever I’m going to do.’ You login into it, you don’t realize that that was not a real site because it redirects you to the actual site. It looks like a glitch and maybe you logged in incorrectly. Then it will take you to the real one so you never know what happened. Then they take that password that you used for Facebook, for example, and they start to push it out and see if that works for your corporate email, if that works for your company, if that works for these other things and usually it does and then they’re in.”
Cyber criminals also use a method of locking businesses out of their computers. When this happens, an email is given to use as a contact address to retrieve the business’ data. Once contacted, the criminals will request money before unlocking the accounts.
“Believe it or not, it’s done very professionally,” May said. “It’s absolutely a business. Not a legal business, but it is a business and it’s done in a manner that would shock most people. They want to keep it on the up and up basically, even though its illegal, so people continue to pay.”
May says one of the main problems today is the reuse of passwords. According to him, it is important to create different passwords for every account, passwords that are hard to guess. He recomends the app Dashlane to store all of those passwords. The app will even generate difficult passwords for you as well.
“There’s a lot of people that try to sell, I guess you would say, logos that just want to stamp a name and say it makes you secure,” he said. “What we understand is that you need to look at the entire landscape of that business to understand where the information assets live in various places and then figure out a really good path to do that and lay out a strategic plan. We can’t go at these things haphazardly anymore.”
Various cyber security topics will be discussed at the upcoming workshops that will aim at getting those at-risk business on the right path to a safer cyber network. The workshops will be offered for free through the partnership between Advantage Technology and WVSBDC and are as follows:
- Tuesday, July 17 at the Charleston Area Alliance in Charleston, W.Va.
- Monday, July 23 at the Robert H. Mollahan Research Center in Fairmont, W.Va.
All workshops are from 8:30 a.m. until 11:30 a.m.
For more information on the workshops, visit wvsdbc.com.
Story by Hannah Williams