Cyber Attacks on the Rise, with guest speaker Nancy Henriquez of Synetek Solutions

 

In today's post, we're going to be doing a little bit of textile rental talk, with special guest Nancy Henriquez, VP of Sales & Marketing of Synetek Solutions.

So for those who don't know, Synetek Solutions provides Outsourced IT Services for small and medium-sized businesses, with processes that make the difference.

Besides, Nancy also has her own podcast called Business + Tech = Success, and it's a wonderful podcast! Awesome, right? By the way, we just saw each other recently at the 2022 Clean Show in Atlanta. We had an amazing experience at the event, and this was actually Nancy's first Clean Show Event, where she learned a lot about the industry itself.

But today, we wanted to talk about something that we are hearing almost on a daily basis. That is Cybersecurity and Ransomware Attacks, something that we think maybe hasn't been at the top of people's minds in this industry of small and medium-sized textile rental operators.

Is this something the industry should be concerned about? Are small businesses
exempt from these types of attacks? No, the industry is not exempt, and they should definitely be worried.

Let's put it in terms of fishing... If you cast a wide net, you catch what you catch, regardless of size. And so it's the exact same thing when it comes to the Cybercrimes that are happening. Therefore, small businesses are not exempt at all.

We know that this is a bigger topic that perhaps we don't have time for today, and probably putting together a complete company strategy would take a little bit of time.

But we do have some advice for you on something that you could do today, something simple, a starting point that could just begin to make your company or organization just a little bit more secure.

So one quick tip we want to mention is to enable MFA wherever you can, especially when it comes to email, which is often overlooked. And for our non-tech readers here, MFA stands for Multi-Factor Authentication, and that is simply the process of when you log into an application, like a website or bank account, it will text you a code to your phone or maybe an email to your email address that you have to then plug in to log in.

One step is that you can enable MFA on most of the applications you use!

We know today it's required in a lot of applications, and in the very near future, it's going to be required basically everywhere. We're even hearing from some people that insurance companies are now really pushing back hard on these cyber attacks on insurance claims, and refusing some of the claims.

Two things someone could do today are one, to enable MFA where possible. Possibly even document that in your company's procedures, so employees have that in a written form. And two, maybe go back to the insurance policy and make sure that you're fully
compliant with the checklist that is already filled out.

This was a quick discussion that we'd talk a lot more about at the Alliant Conference in October, where Nancy will be speaking in one of the breakout sessions. She will cover everything about Cybersecurity and Cyber Attacks, while touching base a little bit more in-depth on what small business owners can do to protect themselves, their team, and their company as well.

You can register now for Alliant's Conference where we’ll review updates to our current products, provide training sessions, and introduce some new things, too!

We hope to see you in Fort Worth in October!