Meeting w/ Business Leaders In Richmond Va.

Nearly all of those who attended today’s seminar in Richmond received complementary assessments through Sklar, the sponsoring reseller, along with Continuum (the company who recently acquired part of the Zenith Infotech managed services company). Just before speaking I had the opportunity to review some of the latest security trends – many of these are highly relevant to small/medium business owners. A few sound bites that made their way into my keynote:

760 iBahn customers (companies in including Marriott) have been compromised through the iBahn network…
Hotel hotspots are under fire using a sort of “Man in the Middle” attack that install bots on one’s computer – this would also apply to any hotspot including those free networks at Panera and Starbucks.
An alarming number of Android apps containing bots
Unsecured smart phones
Recent hacker activity developing between China and the Philippines (This will be interesting to watch as pressures grow).

Also, consider the number of recent reports coming out of China, alerting us to efforts to steal US intellectual capital! This should cause every business owner to feel a sense of urgency, to make sure their company secrets, new inventions, and business strategies are kept in a safe place. The biggest issue I see as I visit different cities is simply that business leaders are unaware of how urgent these threats are, and are assuming they are safe when they don’t see evidence of cyber attacks on their own computers. The best attacks are stealth – company leaders need to know this, while consulting companies must develop the tools and skills to accurately assess security risk.