Artificial Intelligence May Be Targeting Your Organization

As a privately held organization, you may worry about managing your growing company, how to boost sales or the best way to approach marketing practices, but if you aren’t careful, you may have a much bigger problem: cybersecurity. With the rise of artificial intelligence, there are more opportunities for cyberattacks if you aren’t aware of what you need to be protected.

The FBI reports that the cost of cybercrime topped $2.7 billion in 2018 – and that’s just the volume of financial losses reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Cyberattacks are frighteningly common. Business insurance company Hiscox says that 47% of privately held businesses in the United States have experienced at least one instance of hacking in the past year and 44% of those firms have had as many as four cyberattacks.

If it seems like hackers are targeting privately held businesses, you aren’t wrong. According to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, over 60% of security breaches in 2018 involved small organizations– a leap of 8% from the year before – and the cost to the company is high. Most privately held businesses report that getting hacked cost them somewhere between $84,000 and $148,000. The damage is high enough that 60% of organizations that experience a data breach will go belly up in six months or less. Yet, some 90% of smaller firms do not have a cybersecurity plan in place.

You might wonder why a group of hackers would want to hack your organization over trying their hands at a larger corporation. Rick Koski, Vice President of Operations at Aldrich Technology, has the answer. “You have employees. They have names and addresses, social security numbers and credit profiles. That’s all hackers need to obtain credit cards, file fraudulent tax returns, etc.”

Hackers don’t care how small your operation is. In fact, they often are not “people” at all. They are more often (and increasingly) machines.

Today’s hackers are criminal enterprises with entire teams devoted to stealing personal and corporate information for financial gain. They do this because the “industry” is so profitable – and that fact only makes the field more attractive and, in turn, better funded. Hacker organizations can afford next-gen artificial intelligence, and the automated tools that do the heavy lifting for them are ALWAYS ON.

Add to that a tendency of smaller firms to lack the modern security measures that larger corporations utilize, and privately held businesses become an ideal target.

To a hacker, you are not a small business. You are a number, or rather a series of them. Computers are automatically assigned Internet Protocol (IP) addresses when they go online. To hackers, the connected machines at your company are nothing more than a series of IP addresses. The tools that they will use against you are the same ones they would use against a large corporation.

In many cases, these hackers may not even know that they are trying to gain access to your computers specifically. They use automated systems to scan networks and IP numbers, looking for a way in.

It isn’t personal.

Hacking in this modern age is rarely about gaining access to specific information. Hackers are just looking for a vulnerability. Here are some of the most common issues.

Hiring a team like Aldrich Technology to protect and monitor your systems will help you prevent a breach, but it is not the only cybersecurity step you should take. In our next blog article, we will discuss how you can keep your organization safe from hackers. Stay tuned!