Is the DoD’s new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) the future, or just another compliance initiative in the long line of competing cyber standards across a fragmented landscape. One thing is certain, this is a different approach.

Given our status as an affinity partner of CalCPA providing services to many CPA clients, we’ve had quite a few people reach out today with concerns about CCH cloud systems being down and the lack of communication from Wolters Kluwer. While there isn’t much, here is what we do know:

There are two questions I get from business owners all the time:

1. How do I know if I've been hacked?
2. What do I do if I have been hacked?

The answer to question 1 for many small businesses and individuals is

In 2016, the Ponemon Institute completed a study on the “State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB).” The study had many interesting findings, with highlights including:

• 55% of small & medium business suffered a cyber-attack in the past 12 months
• 50 % reported data breaches involving customer & employee information in the last 12 months
• 3 out of 4 reported that exploits have evaded their anti-virus solutions

The results align with what we see every day with clients that call us for incident response and recovery services:

There simply isn't enough time in a day for most small businesses to run their core business, let alone protect themselves from hackers. For that reason, we put together this list of 8 simple tips, that aren't overly time consuming to implement and give small business owners the return on their time from a security standpoint.

Statistics about data breach costs are all over the map and range from $36,000 to $7 million. We developed a real world data breach cost calculator that is relevant to small businesses. In this article, we educate small business owners on the 9 costs that go into that calculator, and a data breach in general.