Cybercrime – Part 2: Crime Against Companies
Companies-related cybercrime continues to outpace individual identity theft for consumers.
Companies are suffering because thieves know they don’t have resources including time and money to put up a strong defense to protect their information against a data breach. Cybercriminals have developed sophisticated techniques to steal private information from the smallest businesses to largest corporations.
Most of the time organizations will never retrieve their losses because they have less fraud protection and a shorter reporting time, a business is not a “person” or “victim” so state and federal laws treat a them differently, business transactions on personal cards are excluded from “zero liability,” and personal cyber security services and insurance are excluded from businesses.
For most owners, their personal and business information are closely tied together, so, a data breach can severely impact both the owner and his company. Just one serious incident could take a company out. It is important to maintain a vigilant effort to protect their personal and business information.
Although cybercrime is on the loose, There are many things a companies should do to protect its information including monitoring banking account and credit card balances on a daily basis, check billing statements when they come in, conduct a regular credit check with the credit agencies and Dun and Bradstreet and regularly change passwords used to log into areas where private information is stored.
Employees should be trained on what can and cannot be shared with individuals outside of the organization and strict rules must be in place to limit the chances of a theft happening.
There’s one more cybercrime protection step most companies miss and it could cost them dearly
One of the schemes cybercriminals use is information from registrations with state governments. Most states are “Good Faith Filing” states, which mean the information filed about a business or organization with the Secretary of State is simply accepted and recorded at face value.
For $10 to $15 in most states, cybercriminals can easily file a change of address, change of officers, directors or registered agent, or even reinstate a previously dissolved company. They may also register a company as a foreign company operating in a different state as their target company.
By manipulating state records in this manner, cybercriminals can obtain the standing and verifiable records needed to deceive creditors and finance institutions, or conduct any number of fraudulent transactions in the business name.
One step they may be missing to prevent companies cybercrime is to monitor their state registration information. There are two things every owner can do, that won’t take a lot of time, to prevent or limit the impact of fraudulent state registrations and cybercrime:
- Have a solid anti-malware installed on offices computers – Losing an important data can hurt your business so much. For you not to tell stories that touch the heart about how data were compromised and you lost so much in your organizations, have a strong anti-malware installed on every computer.
- Never sign in to business account on just any computer or Wi-Fi
Whether you are business owner or an employee, never sign in your company’s profile on every computer you see; you could become a victim to phishing or keylogging.
Other things to do include:
- Ensure employees are educated about cybercrime: how they can be victims and how to protect themselves
- Inculcate constant data backup habit
- Separate backups from computers where they were gotten from
- Patch up your computers’ operating system
