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Ah, October. Fall is in the air (except in Florida), and Christmas décor and music assault the senses well before work has begun on the Thanksgiving dinner guest list.
For that reason, October also happens to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
“People get complacent because of the joyous mood of the holiday season,” says Ed Bides, Jacksonville-based Florida Capital Bank’s information security officer. That can be especially true of small businesses, many of which don’t have full-time staff dedicated to data security but are entering their busiest months of the year.
“It’s a time when everybody’s doing a lot of financial transactions,” Bides adds, “not only from a storefront standpoint but also via websites and phones.”
Bides says Florida Capital Bank, which also has offices in Tampa, Orlando and Gainesville, has switched from an annual to quarterly cybersecurity training schedule because of the ongoing, rapid evolution of online threats to its network, as well as changes to regulations that govern businesses’ use of consumer data.
“Things are changing on a day-to-day basis as far as regulations for how we protect customers’ information and what we do to notify them if something does ever happen,” Bides says.
The first step, he says, is to develop a data security plan, and there are many simple, inexpensive ways to do that. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Trade Commission have a wide range of resources available free of charge, such as the Internet Crime Complaint Center , or IC3.
Any plan should also include social media, which has become a huge threat to data security, Bides says, with people buying and selling merchandise via outlets such as Facebook Marketplace and using their social media accounts to log in to e-commerce sites. Just last month, for example, in a well-reported case, Facebook reported as many as 50 million user accounts had been compromised by a cyberattack.
A cybersecurity plan is especially important for Gulf Coast businesses, Bides adds, because of the possibility of power outages caused by hurricanes. “Businesses nowadays are information driven,” he says, “and without access to that information, your business is basically dead.”
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