Years ago, I remember a friend, the President of a local community bank, sharing that her personal accounts had been breached. The nightmare we all feared was now her reality.
The irony of her situation is not, of course, lost on any of us.

Even when we are informed and aware, we can be at risk.

Recently I attended Integro Bank’s CEO Club and a panel discussion led by Steve Zylstra of the Arizona Technology Council discussing the growing threats to Cybersecurity all business face. The advent of Artificial Intelligence tools is increasing the odds of security breaches, as automated attacks appear increasingly credible. They made a very clear point that it is always human fallibility that causes the breach. A human makes the decision to ‘ake the bait’that cascades into costly business liability.

I’ not in the information technology business nor the insurance business, but I listened to the presentation wondering if my business has adequate protection. We now employ AI tools to operate business functions, linking our data and tools to other software and research tools. Each time we use a new technology we expose our data and ourselves to risk.

Today, I opened our cybersecurity insurance policy –is it what it needs to be? And I slowed down my decision to onboard new research tools using AI. I want to be sure the tools I employ are sound and that I have adequate protection in place for the people data and proprietary data that is core to what we do.

And I reached out to one of the presenters from last week. Dara Gibson of Cybersecurity Readiness Advisors. She helps businesses protect themselves. She is right here in the heart of our business community. She says it’ a misconception that cyberattacks target only large corporations. We are all vulnerable.