SPOKANE, Wash – IT experts in the region are warning Spokane business owners about an alarming new tech trend that has exploded in the last six months: cybercriminals are hacking local businesses.Wil Buchanan, the CEO of Philantech3, an IT services company, works with 42 businesses in the region and says times are changing, and AI is the catalyst, “in the past, it was always too expensive to attack small Spokane companies with an AI that no longer is the case.”Buchanan shared data with NonStopLocal that showed by 2027, worldwide cyber attacks could cost companies close to $24 trillion.”As long as the money is there, they are going to keep adapting and adopting new technologies, including AI,” said Buchanan. He added that there is a low-cost but lucrative trend called ‘hacking as a service, ‘ and mid-size companies with 250-350 employees could face up to 1500 cyber attacks per week.”They just pay a very small amount of money to buy the tools and basically go to business.”Buchanan said hackers are executing more sophisticated tactics. ” What we’re seeing now is that the email attacks are coming out at legitimate email addresses that you already know and do business with.”According to Buchanan, cybercriminals take two approaches: rerouting money to different accounts and stealing money. The largest he has seen is $300,000, but luckily, the company’s bank flagged this: ” If that transfer had gone through, it would have bankrupted the organization.”The second is holding the company’s data for ransom, “if you don’t have a solid backup and recovery system, you have to pay that hacker, and so you might pay them $50,000,$60,000, $70,000 or more to unlock your data so you can do business again.”He recommended regularly updating software, practicing strong authentication, and maintaining security hygiene to prevent this from happening.”It used to be that if an organization had a good firewall, maybe some antivirus on each computer, you’d be safe. That’s not the case anymore.”He said an equally important component to keeping your business safe is training your employees to look for red flags like Urgency to wire money or questing for routing numbers to be changed. “We feel like it’s irresponsible in today’s business and threat landscape not to really take steps to protect your assets and just your ability to do business.”
