Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

This week, in partnership with the US Small Business Administration Mastercard announced a package of $250m to help small businesses – included in which my RiskRecon team at Mastercard launched an initiative to make cyber risk analytics available to all participants of the SBA Paycheck Protection Program.

https://newsroom.mastercard.com/press-releases/mastercard-commits-250-million-to-support-small-business-financial-security/

Given that the majority of cyber attacks we see small businesses fall victim to are opportunistic, untargeted campaigns designed by the criminals to reel in unsolicited victims – they often rely on simplistic attack strategies – phishing emails, known vulnerabilities in common software such as WordPress and Magento, and other well-understood points of attack. These campaigns are mostly, if not completely automated, and this any vulnerable business can become a victim. The old excuse of “I don’t do anything important – I’m a small business” doesn’t protect one from compromise – the criminal’s automated systems don’t know or care – if they can hack you, they do. 

Products like RiskRecon help companies understand their exposure and help steer dollars and time spent into solving the most critical problems – the problems most likely to be exploited by criminals.

By making this tech generally available I hope we can help people protect their companies better, and maybe force the criminals to change their methodologies.

You can register for this offering on Riskrecon’s website.