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Veterinary Blueprints
The Veterinary Blueprint Podcast is all about taking the blueprint of industry experts and breaking it down in short, digestible episodes you can use to take your practice to the next level. Join host Bill Butler as he interviews experts on client and practice management, financial strategies, human resources, and more. Gain valuable insights and stay ahead in the veterinary field by tuning in to tips from successful experts inside and outside the veterinary industry.
Veterinary Blueprints
# 3 Cybersecurity Safeguards for Your Veterinary Practice
Discover how to fortify your business against the relentless threats of cyber crimes as we converse with Daniel Metcalf, a seasoned technologist and managing partner at Cyber Fin. With two decades of experience under his belt, Daniel shares valuable insights on the gravity of cybersecurity for small businesses, particularly veterinary practices. We jump right into illuminating discussions on the risks that lurk in the digital world and the solutions that can help your business stay secure.
Ever wondered how an email can cripple a business? We unfold the intricacies of Business Email Compromise, a common, yet lethal tactic employed by cybercriminals to infiltrate your business communication. Daniel details how Cyber Fin offers vigilance round the clock, keeping businesses protected from pervasive threats such as ransomware, phishing, and malware. Moreover, we delve into the role of human error, the leading cause behind 82% of cyber breaches.
The landscape of cybercrime is evolving at a rapid pace, with cybercriminals offering 'Ransomware-as-a-Service' and 'Business Email Compromise-as-a-Service' on the dark web. But fear not, as we discuss how to combat these threats with a two-pronged strategy recommended by Daniel - proactive prevention and reactive insurance. Stay tuned to equip yourself with the knowledge to safeguard your business from the damages of cyber breaches, a menace that has pushed 60% of businesses to shut down within the first six months of attack.
Guest Info
Daniel Metcalf – Contact Information
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmetcalf/
Email - dm@cyberfin.net
Cyber Self Check - https://cyberfin.net/lp/cybersecurity-self-check/index.html
Host Information
Bill Buter – Contact Information
Direct – 952-208-7220
https://butlervetinsurance.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbutler-cic/
Schedule a Strategy Session with Bill – Strategy Session
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60% of businesses that go through a severe breach, like a ransomware, like a business email compromise, they go out of business within the first six months.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Veterinary Blueprint podcast brought to you by Butler Vet Insurance. Hosted by Bill Butler, the Veterinary Blueprint podcast is for veterinarians and practice managers who are looking to learn about working on their practice instead of in their practice. Each episode we will bring you successful, proven blueprints from others, both inside and outside the veterinary industry. Welcome to today's episode.
Speaker 3:All right, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Veterinary Blueprints podcast. My name is your host, bill Butler, and so excited to bring another action-packed episode to you today. Very excited about our episode today because it is a hot topic for veterinarians across the United States Hopefully not for you, but I know that it's affecting many veterinary practices out there. Just very excited to have our guest on today. We're going to cover cyber insurance and that's cyber insurance, cyber protection. Hopefully you don't have to use your cyber insurance, which is really what that boils down to. I'm grateful to have Daniel Metcalf, a managing partner at Cyber Fin, joining me today for our episode.
Speaker 3:A little bit about Daniel. I came to know Daniel a number of years ago through some insurance associations that we work with and came to work with him and his partner, chris. What they bring to the insurance industry. They came up with a product and a solution to assist insurance agents. Because we're a pretty regulated industry, they came up with a product and a solution to assist us. Obviously, many insurance agents do buy cyber insurance, but we need front-end protection. We have a lot of data that needs protecting. Chris and Daniel had come up with a product and a solution for financial services in the insurance industry. They've been able to leverage that with some veterinary clients that we work with and some medical practices in the medical community across the United States.
Speaker 3:I thought it would be great to have Daniel on today to introduce himself and Cyber Fin talk about some things that would assist veterinary practices out there from a mindset perspective about protecting everything they've worked so hard for. From a cyber crime perspective, what's happening out there in the marketplace? I think we're all in our own little business silos about what's happening. We hear about cyber crime and cyber incidents, but what does that really mean? I think Daniel can bring some insight to that and how it really can affect a small business and specifically veterinarians. Welcome, daniel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm honored to be here. Thanks so much, Bill, for inviting me on the show.
Speaker 3:Tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump into all things cyber. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you came to work with—I've known Chris for 10 years. Your other business partner. I've known Chris for 10 years. How did you come to be involved with him at Cyber Fin?
Speaker 1:I appreciate that I spent the last 20 years of my career in the technology space for businesses. There's business challenges and I like to build technology solutions to solve those business challenges. Over the last seven or eight years it's been in the cybersecurity space, specifically around financial institutions, small banks, credit unions, insurance practices, wealth practices. That's where I met Chris. Chris owns a life insurance agency and he's being regulated. He needs to be protected on the front end. He just asked me to come in and look at his organization and we identified after 90 days and $30,000 in expenses, that he was neither protected nor regulated. He was not compliant. So he's like hey, I think we need to come up with a solution for small and human-sized businesses that can do both.
Speaker 3:He also figured out he wasn't alone. Every financial service yeah, every financial service is a professional out there. This came about because of things that were happening in New York. New York's very regulated. He's looking at some things. That's how Chris came to that. Then he brought you in and figured out that there's a huge gap. I think I'll let you keep going about that, but then we can dive into the conversation.
Speaker 1:Certainly Ultimately, when we focused on insurance agencies, if you will, and that brought us into because insurance agencies are really risk advisors and so, around the cyber reliability insurance and some of the risks of their clients, they started bringing us in to their clients like veterinarian practices, health practices, Geez. We've been working with pool companies lately, A lot of small and human-sized business verticals, because they didn't up to this point have access to a service like ours or to a posture like ours that could be brought into a small and human-sized business. That could be that front-end protection for them, especially at a cost-effective way at what the enterprises were able to do. And it helped the insurance agents because then they were able to actually secure cyber reliability insurance for those individuals from that site.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think when you're talking about enterprise level, you're talking about the targets, the three. You know we're here in Minnesota, you and I are both in Minnesota. You know, talking about enterprise level, it's healthcare insurance or health insurance companies, it's Target 3M, you know. You think about the big companies who've had the breaches and made the news, even going back a few years home deep, all right. So that's enterprise level.
Speaker 3:And I think one of the things that affects small businesses and the practices that I know is that you know they have an IT professional and they, you know, if they need a new computer set up or some IT services, they work with the local IT professional and they have firewalls you know I'm using air quotes here Firewalls in place and they, you know, update their Microsoft stuff, but that's not necessarily what's needed in today's age. And so trying to bring some of those large corporation or enterprise levels, as you said, some of that large mindset, to small business and being able to give an affordable solution to protect your business. So you mentioned a little bit about you know, your kind of background and what. What are you, why are you passionate about this and what kind of gets you motivated to work with small businesses in this area.
Speaker 1:Yeah, originally it was in, you know, in the financial institutions. I didn't want to see anybody on Main Street lose you know money out of their bank account or lose their job over a cyber attack. And as I started moving into more of the you know outside of financial institutions, into Main Street, especially like insurance agencies and other types of small businesses, I'm watching them go out of business, right. So I started getting passionate to say, wow, I know of this solution. You know, I know of the way that we could help set up a small business outside of what an IT firm can do. Because IT, you know, they didn't. They didn't go to school to be security guards, right, they didn't go. Go to school to go try to figure out how to keep the bad guys out of your computers. They went there to make sure your computers are working, make sure your software is working, you know, make sure you're productive and they do the best they can.
Speaker 3:They're trying to make sure, sure everything's connected not necessarily protected, right? So it's making sure all the, all the pieces of of a technology talk to one another. Not necessarily that it will keep the bad guys from getting in there.
Speaker 1:Right, so my first small business go out of business due to a cyber attack. I'm like, okay, I want to now bring this to all the small and meme size businesses out there. You know, at least bring the cyber posture. Whether you use cyber fence services or not, at least give them the you know, give them the blueprint of what's necessary and get that, get them thinking about cybersecurity, because I don't want to see another small business go out of business because of a cyber attack. I just don't want to see it.
Speaker 3:So you know the, the, the businesses you're seeing affected and what you know, kind of jump right into the conversation. So cyber fin as a, as an entity, you know what sort of services do you provide? And then, I think, talking about how those integrate with what you're seeing out there in the marketplace right now with you know, I know that we've connected on some some veterinary practices. So what, what do you see in that area? So you know, in in the insurance world we offer the protection on the back end and cyber fence. Cyber fence really the frontline of protection versus the post event where you have a cyber policy in place. So what does cyber fin do? How are you different? You know, when you're talking about IT or an IT professional, what, what makes cyber fin different and how are you protecting small businesses and veterinary practices?
Speaker 1:Yep. So yeah, really, what makes us different? There's two things that I hope that all the people on your show remember about the differences, about what, what, what we're what we're talking about today. Cyber security now is an always on activity, and what makes cyber reason why we're a cybersecurity as a service is we're 24 by seven, 365 people who are managing your cybersecurity or cyber posture for you. So two words in particular sock and sim, and a tech stack. All together mesh together, right? So sock and sim, tech, tech stack working where human beings are the one managing for you, so that you don't have to Right 24 by seven, 365.
Speaker 3:So it's not the old school firewall just making sure that you've got your malware on your computer. It's really a robust system that's being managed by someone with eyeballs on what's happening on a daily basis. Yep.
Speaker 1:So put in, put in your mind's eye. Right, you have the, you've got the, the security operation center with all the computer screens all the way across. It has all the different alerts and has every you know, has every pinpoint of every computer that's out there under management, and every internet connection and every email box, all sitting on a bunch of screens and watching to see what the bad guys are doing and making sure people aren't making the wrong clicks or they're, you know the, downloading the wrong document or they're making the wrong move, because we're all busy, we're all moving really fast, right? So? And I just kind of explained what that mesh looks like, so it's your internet protection lifeguard on duty lifeguard on duty 24 by seven 365.
Speaker 1:Right, because again there's 24, you know the bad guys know when you're sleeping, right, and even if you're a 24 hour business, they know when you're not. You're not at full strength as far as what, you know what's going on, cause that's what they're looking for, right? So that's what they're looking for. 11,000.
Speaker 3:11,000.
Speaker 3:That's 250-some-week right. So as of, yeah, so as of, I think, avma numbers. These are a couple years old, but there are like 26,000 companion animal practices in the United States, as of, you know, five or six years ago. And so if you think of, you know, that's like, if you think total practices, not just companion animal but just total practices you're talking about probably a third of all veterinary practices have suffered some sort of cyber attack.
Speaker 3:And one of the statistics that I just you know that I use and I know 82% of all cyber breaches are human error, that's clicking a link that you know to kind of jump into this. So you know. So cyberfins, given this frontline protection, eyeballs on what you're doing every day, hey, I clicked on the wrong email, or they see you click on a wrong email, or you know, all of a sudden the screen goes blank. What do we do? And so somebody's there to assist you who has some experience with this. So you know, talking about those veterinary practices for a second, daniel, and really kind of diving into the meat of this, where are, you know, how are cyber crimes affecting practices? So if you're a veterinary practice, you know, number one, where are those incidents coming from? And then how are they being affected?
Speaker 1:Yep. So there's three in particular that are most prevalent going on in the veterinary practice world. So the crime is, and I'll show how it's getting affected by the veterinary practice. So the first one is ransomware right, and it sounds just like it is right. It's a cyber extortion where they're locking you out of your practice management software. They're locking you out of your devices. Heck, you know some of these devices now run. You know the health practice machines run on IoT, right. Internet of Things right. They require a wireless connection in order to do it. They're locking those down and you have to give them money in exchange for getting it back, right?
Speaker 3:So they're lab equipment that's connected to the Internet. They're digital x-ray that's connected to the Internet. Heck, even I mean my copy machine here at the office, my, you know my print shop that I buy my ink toner cartridges from. They know how many copies I'm running and what I need to buy a new cartridge because my printer is connected to the Internet. So what you're saying is in a ransomware attack, anything that's connected to the Internet is getting locked down. So voice over, ip phones, computers, anything that is connected to the Internet of Things, iot, is getting frozen and locked down and ransom.
Speaker 1:Right with a screen saying if you don't give me so much Bitcoin and so much time, I'm just going to delete everything, and you're never going to see your appointment calendar again. You're never going to get any of your client records back ever again, and so that's where they get affected, and we're also going to turn it into a brick. Right, exactly, yes, we're going to corrupt the system.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so that gets you off your game. So then, what if you couldn't see one of your companion pet patients? What if you didn't have access to your calendar? What if you couldn't provide any of the services that you could, even for a couple of days? How much would that cost? Not only the ransom itself, but how much would it cost for ingest and loss, revenue and then, of course, reputation, because as soon as a couple of people walk in for their appointments and say sorry, our computers have been hacked, how fast does that get around town?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can't look up the X-ray from last Friday and it's Tuesday on your follow-up, because all the computers are smoked.
Speaker 1:Got it, you got it. So that's one of the. And again, the ransomwares are typically in the $130,000 to $200,000 range, so it doesn't get in the news right Now. If it was in a half a million dollar range, I'm sure it'd be all over the news. But the bad guys know that too right. They know what it takes in order to keep their enterprise moving forward right.
Speaker 3:To put a period on that. One of the famous ones that happened within the last couple of years was the Atlanta ransomware. So they were being ransomed something like $6 million and people were having to show up and pay their bill, their water utility bills in person, with a check, and so that's on a large scale. For a small business, a veterinary practice, you're going to get ransom for that $50,000 to $200,000 range. It's not going to make any news, but it's definitely going to affect your business. So the ransomware, yeah. So that's the ransomware issue. What's kind of next on the list?
Speaker 1:So the second one's called Business Email Compromise it's also known as Person in the Middle where they're going to try to get credentials. They're going to trick you into clicking on something or downloading something, where they get credentials into your email address. They actually get your email login and password, or somebody at one of your employees or somebody one of the technicians they're logging in password and what they're going to do is they're going to rifle through your different documents and send documents and they're going to change them, and what they're going to do is they're going to watch and learn everything about it and they're going to look for something like payment information and they're going to change an invoice, so they're just going to get in and lurk and watch.
Speaker 1:You got it.
Speaker 3:And they see what gets sent and when it gets sent and your kind of workflow as a business. Waiting to do something is what you're saying. Okay, Right.
Speaker 1:Either they're going to use your email box to try to get into a bigger organization like your insurance carrier, or like another practice or referral practice or something bigger, financial institution or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Something that affect or another. What they've been doing most popular as of late is taking some type of payment information that you send some type of invoice, some kind of bill, and they're going to just change the number of the bank. Or they're going to tell somebody hey, we now take wire payments instead of because it's safer than credit card payments. We just saw this last week and so, hey, and then all of a sudden, a lot of people ignore it, but there are still some people out there who are going to go. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And then you're going to pay their bill via that wire. Well, guess what? You're not going to know about it until someone goes, calls them and says, hey, you have a late bill, and they're like, no, I don't, I just paid you by wire. Here it is Like we don't take wires, right, and that's so. You don't know how much of that payment is going to be. You know, by that time, the bad guys already out of there because they've already taken that money.
Speaker 3:So I know of a couple instances where they've actually sent, they've used, you know, business owners email address to email an employee who handles the payroll, because they're lurking in the background saying, okay, this is the person who handles the payroll.
Speaker 3:And then they've sent a new EFT form saying, hey, change my direct deposit for my paycheck from one bank to another, made it look like it's coming from an employee or somebody at the practice or the business, and then that payroll check is going to go into the new bank account, not the actual employee's bank account. So, you know, the payday rolls around and that payroll check wound up going into the bad guy's bank account. I also know of another incident where a QR code got sent and it was hey, you need to log into your Microsoft password, you know your account information for some HR stuff. And this person just scanned the QR code right after computer logged into their Microsoft account and then was like, wait a second, why did I get sent this? Emailed another person on their team and said, hey, why did I get this? This just took me to log into my password.
Speaker 3:But that was the bad guy sending a QR code, that person scanning it right off of their computer screen on their phone logging in, and now somebody's in their email account and then you've got to take action. So that's how that happens. What does cyberfin do on the email side, or what should be in place on the email side for you know whether it's cyberfin or somebody else to be able to assist with that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, this is where layered protection comes into place, right, and that's what we do. Is we put a layer of protection on every single user instead of just people in the office in general. Right, so it's CASL security versus what we call user-based multi-layered protection. So it starts with multi-factor authentication, right? So that means that it's something that you know and something you have, and if you've probably done it before, you type in a login and password in it, it pings your phone and tells you hey, here's a code that you have to put in, or you have to press this button, whatever. That starts with it, right? So that's one layer. The next layer is every single email for your business should be filtered by an email filtering tool, and that's cyberfin has one, specifically that every business email goes through that filtering tool. So now you know they're supposed to be there, right Now, let's just say they were able to get through it.
Speaker 3:This is just a spammer junk mail.
Speaker 1:It's not just a spammer junk mail.
Speaker 3:It's somebody checking to make sure. Hey, this is a known bad ISP. These emails aren't getting to you because this is a bad actor. And I know, because we subscribe to your service, that this list is continually being updated and now it's not foolproof, right. So you get one that comes through. Hey, here's your invoice from PayPal and I know for us. I just forward that on to the team and say, hey, add this to the list. And then that you know no more emails will get through. It gets added to the blacklist.
Speaker 1:Not only that, but if we actually pull out all the emails that have that similar there's like a change back.
Speaker 3:I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we go pull all those emails from every one of every one of the email boxes that we have access to, not only for your practice, but then also all the other people within CIDR network, right? So think of us like a network plan, right? So it's all the network. We go and we say oh, here's the, here's the the look and feel of this email, here's the domain it came from. We can go and pull all those in, remade it, all those emails out of that, out of that system, and then also on top of it, what's, what's above and beyond, is that we rewrite every single URL inside that email. So yeah, says PayPal, it's got a link on it. You know, not only are we pulling those up, but let's say it gets through, we rewrite the link to it. So it says protect, fire, I in front of it because that means it's going through our servers. Right, so they click on the link. It goes to our servers first and it goes oh, wait a minute, this is not a good, this is not a good website.
Speaker 3:Right, this is not PayPal. We shouldn't be here right. Block you from going there. Pay your pal, yeah sure.
Speaker 1:Warns you, same idea Warns us. We go in, we remediate, we take that email out of there, and we can. You know it freaks people up because they're like, oh, I saw this email in my email box. Where did it go? It's well, because we took it and made sure nothing bad could happen to it, right. And then let's just say that we rewrite a link that goes to what looks like a legitimate website, right, but there's a bad link inside that, inside that website page, under our internet protection, right, another layer, internet protection, what we call a VPN, a virtual private network, right, All tied together, that virtual private network. If you try to click to go into the bad, right, because it got through the email rewrite. Now it's trying to take you to a bad site from that legitimate website page. It's going to block you from going there. So all along the way, at that point, boom, you're getting blocked. You know there's layered protection and eventually the bad guy just gives up. They're not going to go to the fourth, fifth, sixth step. Heck, it'll be pretty, pretty amazing if they go through two steps, right, like the one you're mentioning on the QR code.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of work, but they know that you have highly leveraged information. They have, you know they have first name, last name, email addresses, addresses, credit card numbers, light sometimes. You know they're very highly sensitive data that someone goes. Well, what are they going to do with it? They sell it on the dark web. Because you don't, you know what you can do with some of the information on the dark web, creating identity theft problems. You're creating credit problems. They can create bank accounts Heck, they can create actual email addresses that look just like you right, very similar to you, that they can go after your. They can go after your customers with.
Speaker 3:So you know, really, because so much of this is driven by employees or human error, and really what you need to do as a business professional or as a just a person in the world, you need to slow down and look at what you're doing and having some tools like cyberfin offers whether it's a cyberfin product or cyberfin or something similar it's to slow things down, because the speed of clicking through something and thinking everything's okay and oh, that was a bad link, well, that's where the problems occur, and then you know needing to remediate the problems. So what are some best you know talking about? So those are the three, right? So we've got ransomware email. And then what was the third one, daniel?
Speaker 1:The last one was they're stealing your data, right, so it's data piracy. So they're stealing the data and they're selling it on the dark web.
Speaker 3:So you know for my unfortunately going through so many continuing education classes for cyber stuff over the last few years because this has become such a problem is every time I go to one I think, man, I'm going to sell my insurance agency because I just don't want.
Speaker 3:this is scary, I don't want to deal with this and you know I sell insurance for this stuff. But you know, and just even as a small business owner like you said, it can be you know, quote, unquote a death event for the business. If you have one of these attacks, your the average shutdown time is three weeks. If you're, if you have a ransomware event, just to get back up and running and have everything back in place, you probably have to buy a new hardware. And so what happens is for my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong is they might be in your system. They, you know you have a team member, you click a link and then they're just monitoring your system for you know, a couple months, seeing when you're paying bills, when the cash flow, they know, on the 18th of the month you've got the most money in the bank and now it's time to strike because, hey, we're going to send the fake invoice and do the thing.
Speaker 3:But then a lot of times the parting gift is that ransomware attack. So they don't start with ransomware, they get in your system. They spend a whole bunch of spoof emails out of your system. You don't know that they're using your email account to further their cyber enterprise, criminal enterprise, and actually in your email account. Why don't you talk for a second about that? Because I know that's occurred as well and you didn't touch on it too deeply. But if they get in your email, they're actually sending out hundreds of emails from your email account without you knowing describe that process or what that would look like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they again part of that business email compromises. They already have access to your email and your domain and what they can do is it's called a relay where they can start sending emails as you to all of your contacts inside your contact list Could be all the contacts inside everybody in your organization's contact list with their own type of attack to try to go get their credentials right, because they're going to continue to send those emails and if you went into your sent box or you're deleted, you would never see them Because, if you think about it, it's leaving your email box and going to a box that they like their own screen, if you will, of your copy of your email box and that's what they're sending as you.
Speaker 3:So you don't even know these are being sent.
Speaker 1:No idea.
Speaker 3:You don't even. And then, if it's going to your emails being received by a client, business associate, vendor for your practice, it looks like legitimate email because it's coming from your email account and so it's bypassing somebody else's filtering because it's a legitimate. It's not a fake email, it's not some goofy. You know, bill.83superegol at gmailcom is the sent it's bill at butlervetinsurancecom or Daniel at Cyberfin, and so they just lurk and do this for sometimes months on end and then figure out when they're going to strike, do the attack on you, whatever that might be, and then their parting shot is hey, we're going to leave some ransomware on here as well.
Speaker 3:How easy is it for these cyber criminals? So it's really that you get the full meal deal. It just might be over a period of months. How easy is it for these cyber? You know, if I wanted to be a cyber criminal today and stop working with veterinarians and protecting their practice from an insurance perspective and say I'm going to get into the cyber crime business, how easy is it for somebody to really start doing this as a cyber criminal?
Speaker 1:Well, unfortunately, unfortunately. So there's a companies that out there called ransomware as a service, or business email compromise as a service, and you can go on the dark web and you can download the software and the instructions right. Right there, it's going to teach you everything on a video platform, just like you wouldn't learning something else, and you can then become a cyber criminal, right? And so you pay them to get that bad code and then you try to find a way to get that bad code into the, you know, into the victims.
Speaker 3:So I was at a again. I was at a continuing education event and one of the there was actually a Department of Homeland Security was there talking about this. And some of these services are being hosted on name brand. You know servers won't name them, but they're being hosted on name brand servers. You go on there and it's like shopping for, like cable service or cell phones. For the bronze plan, for $300 a month, you get this much support and you can send this many emails and here's the code and we've got to click through rate of this. And for the silver plan, it's an extra $500 a month but we'll send 10,000 emails a day out on your behalf and basically it's somebody just splitting the expense of cyber crime and allowing you to get in as an investor.
Speaker 1:Really, oh right, and you can get an offshore Bitcoin account that goes along with it. You know, an extra 99 cents, right? You can add that on with fries, with that right?
Speaker 3:So the barrier is very low for somebody to start doing this. And if you think about the large numbers, right, it's billions of emails going out every day at our ransomware or malware or some bad actor, and all you need to do is have a large enough percentage of those millions of emails being clicked on and you're going to make money as a cyber criminal. Because it's just, it's a sales funnel of large numbers.
Speaker 1:Correct and that's and same things happening in public spaces. I just want to, because everybody talks about email, the one that keeps getting lost is airports. Now, have you know? They have these portable devices that people are plugging into airports, right, airports, starbucks, hotels, any place where there's a mass amount of people trying that are that may need to get on public Wi-Fi or on that guest Wi-Fi. They're putting those devices in there to spoof what looks like, to be able to, you know, make a copy of a fake copy of you know the airport Wi-Fi or the you know the Wi-Fi even in the airplanes at the hotels, so that you accidentally log into the wrong ones and now that whatever is on your device, they can go and either lock up that device or get on your device or even even compromise all the logins and passwords sitting in your browser. I just want to make this.
Speaker 3:It's not just email, it's not just a Nashville, so it's not just email. But I was just a Nashville event with one of our insurance carriers and so I'm at a Marriott and so what you're saying is they could have spoofed Marriott guest 64 as the as the hotel internet guest internet. And I'm not really logging in to the guest internet for Marriott. I'm logging into somebody else's internet access point and now, because I logged it, they're seeing all everything I'm doing. If I log into my personal bank account, they're seeing everything I'm doing because I'm accessing the internet through their service.
Speaker 1:You got it and they're probably trying to put a key logger on the computer at the same time to start Looking at all the different keystrokes that you have and hoping that you're putting in the same pattern over and over again and that that means it's going to be credentials into something so they can see that you went to XYZ site you, you put in these keystrokes. They replicate the keystrokes. They can get in on their own somewhere else.
Speaker 3:Now right, so key law? I mean in in my book protecting your veterinary practice. I basically lay out all the different horrible things that can happen. You know there's Trojan, horse fishing, spear fishing, you know it's like bricking ransomware, all these awful terms. And so a key logger for those of you not in the know is basically every keystroke or mouse click gets captured by somebody else. So if you type in, you know you know us bank comm in your web browser and then the next keystrokes are your username and ID. Somebody's capturing that on their end and they don't necessarily have to see your screen. They're just capturing all the keystrokes and mouse clicks and then they can go out and replicate that on the back end, like they're replaying a movie on Netflix or something is back it up, replay it, hate, type in this type, this type this in on to this website and boom, they're in your bank account, financial services, quick books, whatever it might be as a business owner, because you logged into something on your laptop.
Speaker 1:Right, correct.
Speaker 3:Awesome. That is so awesome. So let's talk about some proactive and reactive methods we could do to stop this. So one thing that I've started doing is is not logging into public access. I'm using my hotspot off my phone, turning my phone into a hotspot so I'm accessing it, accessing internet through my, through my mobile device, which is direct through an account that I have on a 5g network. Hopefully that will stop some of this. Also, I've got all the cyberfin protection, the front end, the VPN, the email, so I do have an axe, you know, if I do wind up clicking on something or somebody's Accessing my stuff. But for for practices out there, what are, what are some simple things that they can do? You mentioned, you mentioned multifactor, multi-factor authentication, like if there were two or three things that every practice should be doing. What are they, daniel?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I would start with yes, make sure that you require multifactor authentication. But even before you do that, let's start talking about passwords. I would go out tomorrow. If you know what every time a practice calls me says. What should I do tomorrow? Until we get the cyberfin Service in place?
Speaker 1:I want you to go into the admin portal and I want you to Require everybody to reset their login and password. So sign everybody out of all of the old 365 or Google workspace everything that you can sign them out of and make them re-log in and reset a password that's 12 characters in length with a number symbol, uppercase, lowercase. Right, I know that sounds like a lot, but it takes 900,000 years for for a bot to re figure a Email address or email password. Excuse your password with that type of combination. That's the first thing I do. Then I turn on make sure that I also require multifactor authentication Every single time they want to log into their email or the practice management software. Then the next thing that I would do is I would I would implement email filtering Whether, again, email filtering every single email to make sure that at least you're filtering out of a good majority of the emails that are bad emails coming in right 100%.
Speaker 1:And then, lastly, what I would do is I would start to add Information security awareness training for all of my employees, making sure that you know, that at least they go through the fishing simulator, at least they go through all of the videos, because that will slow them, at least you know. Just get them to slow down, think about what they're doing before they just click on something else it's that.
Speaker 3:It's that pause, right, it's. It's that pause to think is this real? Is this what I should be clicking on or not clicking on, because it's that quick click? Or in the case of the QR code, like I'm expecting something from HR, here's an email from something that looks like HR. It's a QR code. I guess I got a log into my Microsoft account, boom, and then all of a sudden Bad actors on your system.
Speaker 3:So it's that slow down and pause, pause To look at what you're doing. So those aren't necessarily big cost things and I think when, when a lot of small businesses think about God, how am I gonna? How am I really gonna get this? Because I think one of the things that that hurt in the insurance industry and we were talking about this Initially in in Minnesota for the insurance community versus the veterinary community when, when I first met you guys Was just I think so many business owners are kind of paralyzed or like they know this is out there, they notice this happening. Obviously, you know 11,000 veterinary practices in the last period of time who've had some sort of incident, and so I think just business owners get paralyzed by the thought of having to try and figure this out on their own, and so, whether it's cyberfin or another service out there, is partnering with someone who really understands this right.
Speaker 1:You're right, correct, absolutely. And again, there are cost-effective ways to be able to monitor everything that you have, and that's what we got in this business right. It does, we can. You can have enterprise level Protection like large company level protection on Main Street. If you find the right people that can, that can actually help you do it, help you put something in place.
Speaker 3:So I'm gonna I'm gonna preface this next comment. There's nothing. There are IT professionals out there who can do exactly what cyberfins doing, or offer the same level of service that so your IT professional is currently helping your practice. I mean, these are the people that you want to ask these questions to. You know right out of the gate hey, can you do email filtering? Can you put a VPN on our system? Hey, hey, can we have some of these? You know robust tools and we'll have a link in the show notes on how they can connect with cyberfin, and you guys offer a 30-minute cyberassessment right Correct for all of our, all of our partners, like Yourself, bill.
Speaker 1:We offer a 30-minute cyber assessment of any practice. We're gonna walk through both from the inside and the outside of where you're the most vulnerable and then give you an idea of what it should cost for you to be able to put All the safeguards in place to fill those gaps, whether it's with cyberfin or someone else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, hey, this is what we do, this is how. This is what the protection you should have in place, whether you buy it from us or not. We'd love if you bought it from us, but just, hey, this is what you should have in place. This is what it should cost. You know, this is what it would cost if you worked with us. If your IT professionals charging less than this for the same services, great, stay there. If they're charging way more, or they're not in place or you want to get a quote from them, hey, that's fine.
Speaker 3:But really, you know, I think, for cyber, this is why I like you guys so much is. At the end of the day, you're kind of like us and our philosophy about their vet insurance. It's you know that there will be a percentage of people that want to work with you, but at the end of the day, it's about making sure that people are protected, whether or not they work with your services or not, which is why I like you and Chris so much is. It's really about protecting the community out there and not about, you know, just trying to sell a service and then, you know, walk away from it To kind of wrap things up.
Speaker 3:You know you talked about the business. You know businesses going out of business and you know the stress of that. I think you know veterinarians are under. All the practices I work with are under a lot of stress as it is, without even thinking about the cyber, cyber stuff. You know hearing workloads trying to get team members on board. But just you know what's the reality for a business that does have this happen and has you know not just you know the bad email or somebody get in their bank account, kind of that, that identity theft that we hear about. What's the reality for a business that has you know talking about going out of business, but what's the reality for a business that has a cyber attack that really has a big impact on them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what we've seen as far as the numbers are concerned, the United States that 60% of businesses that go through a severe breach like a ransomware, like a business email compromise, they go out of business within the first six months. And so ultimately, right now, it's a big risk, right, but it doesn't happen right away, so it's not like we hear a lot about it in the news, right, like I said before, it's usually death by 1000 cuts, because it's that loss of productivity, it's the loss of the ransom, it's the loss of reputation and eventually it just compounds to the fact that, okay, six to eight months later, but no one, no one ever said, wow, they went out of business because of the cyber breach. Right, they went, because it's eight months later. Well, that's really ultimately what happens and that's that's the risk that gets involved.
Speaker 3:So it's not that immediate. You know it's not the tornado that comes through and blows everything away in one minute. It's not like you know if you're thinking about some sort of claim, because of my mind always goes there with the insurance world is. It's not the house fire, where one minute everything's fine and then you know, an hour later, after the fire department leaves, the house is burned down or the business is burned down. It's more like cancer, where it's slow moving, it's insidious. It takes a long time to really understand the scope of everything and how all the impacts are going to be in place.
Speaker 3:And you know cyber fin. It's really a two component system for any business to be protected. It's it's having the front end protection. You know, kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation, it's the front end protection of having something in place like cyber fin, and then it's the back end protection of having, you know, cyber insurance in place, which is the reactive part, to pay the out of pocket. You know all those out of pocket expenses, your data, forensics, replacement of equipment, lost revenue, all those things, and having a cyber insurance policy in place to do that. So really it's kind of a two pronged attack, one's reactive and one's proactive, and so the reactive part is the insurance piece, the proactive part is the, the IT on the front end, whatever that is, from whatever service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that you know, nothing's foolproof but it's the preventative medicine. And then that way, when you know if you were to have a heart incident, you know I'd like to use the. You know those correlations, right, this is preventative medicine, this is eating healthy and you know, you know exercising and all those other things to keep the body going. You still may have a heart attack, but it might lessen the severity of that heart attack, right.
Speaker 3:And then you got the you got the health care insurance.
Speaker 1:You've got the other pieces of insurance that can. That can help make sure that you can keep going, even after an event right and actually help you and help you survive survive that event.
Speaker 3:Well, hopefully the practices out there who are listening in today got some useful information. You know again sorry for the nightmare fuel that I always say when I go to a CE or cyber training and in fact when I was writing the chapter on this and doing some research on it just, man, I don't want to think about the cyber stuff, but it's out there and we all, as business owners and entrepreneurs, need to be looking out for protecting everything we're working so hard for. So thanks so much, daniel. For those of you will have some information the show notes but for the listeners here, what's the best way? Where can they find you online? Are you where you at online?
Speaker 1:Yep, so obviously my email address is dm at cyberfinnet. I'm on LinkedIn. I like to have a lot of conversations there, or website is cyberfinnet.
Speaker 3:Perfect.
Speaker 3:Well, I have information, the show notes, and thanks so much, daniel, for joining us and giving us all some cyber insurance nightmare fuel for this evening. I know, I know it's a it's it's kind of a scary topic, but it's one that business owners in the modern era really need to be focused on and at least have an idea. So thanks so much for joining us today and, as always to our listeners, make sure to like, click, like, click and share. The episode today does help get this out to more veterinary practices and we look forward to having you tune in to our next episode of the veterinary blueprints podcast. Thanks for tuning in to veterinary blueprints.
Speaker 3:If you have any thoughts, questions or suggestions for an episode, I would love to hear from you. Email me at bill at butler vet insurance dot com. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you could do me a huge favor you know it helps with the algorithm if you can like, share or comment on the post, leave a review, I would love it. Thanks for tuning in and until next time.
