Cybersecurity is an important consideration for all businesses—including the over 13,000 private businesses and 420 government establishments that were operating in Baltimore City as of 2020. This has unfortunately been reinforced a few times in the recent past, with many businesses having been the victims of rampant cyberthreats. Let’s review what some of these events have been, and what modern organizations should be teaching their employees to help avoid these issues.

To begin, we’ll consider some of the cybersecurity issues that have impacted Baltimore’s businesses over the past few years.

Baltimore Has Seen Its Share of Cyberattacks

Over the past few years, various cyberattacks have lashed out against Baltimore and its infrastructure. Back in 2018, the city’s emergency dispatching service was taken down for 17 hours due to a ransomware attack—and, just a year later, another ransomware attack forced the government to suspend its operations once again. Ransomware was also responsible for breaches of both Baltimore County Public Schools and the University of Maryland Baltimore within a few weeks of one another at the end of 2020. Greater Baltimore Medical Center was also targeted in 2020 by hackers. In late 2021, a cyberattack led to issues with updating the COVID-19 infection metrics shared on the Maryland Department of Health’s website.

This, of course, says nothing of the various cyberthreats and attacks that are always targeting businesses, including those that operate in Charm City.

Businesses Need to Prepare Their Team Members to Deal with Threats

The reality of modern cyberattacks is that your users are going to be targeted more often than your systems are, simply because your users are inherently and intrinsically more fallible than these systems will be—that’s just how it works.

Plus, with such a diverse variety of businesses to target in cities like Charm City, it basically becomes a numbers game to a cybercriminal. Sooner or later, one of their attacks will make it through and successfully extract the data a business has collected and stored. This kind of data breach can be catastrophic to your business, not only hurting it financially but also causing significant damage to its (and, by extension, your) reputation.

So, in that way, your business’ biggest risk factors are the people you have working for you… unless, that is, you work against these risks and turn your team members into your greatest security asset through training and evaluation.

Don’t Underestimate the Value of Security Training

In order to mitigate these risks, it is critical that your employees are prepared to deal with them appropriately—able to recognize potential threats, and aware of the proper protocols and procedures to follow as a means of resolving these threats. This means your team needs to be trained on these protocols and procedures… something that you can count on the assistance of the team here at Dresner Group to help you with.

In addition to our monitoring and maintenance services, we also work to ensure that our clients are as secure as possible, offering a variety of security-focused services to businesses in Maryland. Give us a call at (410) 531-6727 to find out how we can help prepare your team to deal with any security threats they may encounter.