By now, you’ve heard about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This war is being fought on multiple fronts, one of which being cyber. Russian hackers are launching an all-out assault on key Ukrainian government, banking, and infrastructure targets. Experts expect that these attacks will escalate in Europe and in the U.S.
I spoke with Jim Lippie, the CEO of SaaS Alerts (they monitor more than 120,000 users across 2,100 SMBs for 400 MSPs), and he said that his company is already seeing an upward trend in attacks.
Cyber attacks can take on a life of their own. In 2014, when Russia last attacked Ukraine, they used a cyber bot in their attack. The bot ended up rolling across Europe, creating more than $10 billion in damages (this was just an unintended consequence of Russia’s attack).
Russia’s capabilities are far beyond 2014. In fact, we will see a lot more of what they’re capable of in the coming weeks and months, so what does this mean to us as MSPs?
Well, obviously, there’s an increased risk for us and our customers. You need to use this event to further communicate to your customers that we live in an assume breach world. You need to be discussing why they need business impact assessments (BIAs).
BIAs are a key to incident response planning. It means that every customer needs an incident response (IR) plan and you need to perform tabletop exercises.
I suggest you listen to this recent CyberCall session, where we spoke to the two MSPs that I had on stage at Right of Boom. They were both victims of an RMM breach. We did a survey on the Cyber Call and found that more than 80 percent of MSPs on the CyberCall have not yet done an RMM tabletop — that’s alarming.
This is a chance to get on the same page with every customer to add processes and roles to your offering and increase the value of your services.