With all that’s going on in the world of cybercrime, we’ve received many questions about best practices and as a result we recently held a webinar on corporate cybersecurity.

In 2019 cybercrime will cost us $2.1 trillion and by 2021, it will grow to six trillion. It’s worth pointing out $2.1 trillion is greater than the GDP of the following countries:

• Brazil
• Italy
• Canada
• South Korea
• Russia
• Australia
• Spain
• Mexico
• Indonesia
• Turkey

In fact, there are only seven countries with a greater GDP than cybercrime in 2019. Large companies are seeing massive losses as a result of cybercrime. The breach at Equifax alone cost it $4 billion. Many might think smaller companies are immune from these problems – but they are not.

58% of small businesses know they have been hit, most likely all companies have been breached and many don’t even know it. Part of the problem is cybercriminals spend ten times more on cybercrime than companies and governments. The dark web has made matters worse – some believe the majority of the web is actually made up of the dark web. While this probably not the case in our opinion, it is a still a dangerous place as it allows the sale of user identities and other private information. Many credit the dark web for a 40% increase in account fraud.

In our webinar, we explained how it is important to know what needs protecting and from who. We also need to set up a framework for protecting our organizations. Here at Apex we have combined our best practices with the best of various regulatory bodies and government agencies such as HIPAA, FINRA, the FCC and the FBI.

It's very important to ensure management buy-in… Without it, it is very difficult to do what is needed to protect the organization.

Some important things to focus on are multiple factors for authentication… Ensuring data is encrypted at rest. Training the staff and ensuring you subscribe to POLP or policy of least privilege. In other words, ensure users have no more privileges than absolutely required to do their jobs.

There is so much more and we want to thank you all for registering and participating. To learn more, here is the archive of our webinar.