Cyber Threats: Is Your Company Prepared?

To provide WFG title agents and others in the title and settlement services industry with a greater awareness of what’s behind the surge in cybercrime activity, WEST Marketing Technology Director Brian Nachlas interviewed WEST, a Williston Financial Group company, Chief Information Security Officer Bruce Phillips on Facebook Live. 

Phillips is the mastermind behind WESTprotect^SM, the groundbreaking WFG cybersecurity program, which includes the only cybersecurity helpdesk for small to medium businesses.

Describing it as a “massively important topic,” Nachlas underscored the urgency of the webinar by adding that, “cybersecurity is a very, very real threat in the world.”

Phillips quickly put the threat in context.

“Cybercrime is big business,” he said. “The FBI reported about 800,000 complaints in 2020 with losses of $4.1 billion,” adding that cybercrime and ransomware “has increased over 280 percent in just the first half of this year.”

The webinar took place as the Cloudstar breach was dominating the news – in and beyond the mortgage industry. Phillips cautioned that many still fail to grasp the extent of the danger represented by cybercrime, ransomware and mail fraud.

“There’s a common misconception on ransomware,” he told Nachlas and his audience, “which is that if you pay the ransom, you’ll be back and running. The fact is you may or may not get a decryption key and tool to recover your data. You might be able to recover only a portion of your data. 

“Only four percent of the people who pay the ransom actually get their data back,” he said. 

This important, must-see webinar can be viewed in its entirety above.