INDIANAPOLIS— An Indianapolis movie theater was hit with a cyberattack, which impacted its computer systems.
In a social media post on November 15, Living Room Theaters Indy announced it was unable to operate because of the cyberattack.
It took a week for the theater to recover from the attack and relaunch a brand-new website and ticketing system.
Living Room Theaters is just one of thousands of small businesses across the country that have suffered from a data breach or security breach.
A new report released Wednesday from the Identity Theft Resource Center found:
- 81 percent of small businesses reported suffering a security breach, a data breach or both in the past year.
- AI-powered attacks were identified as a root cause in more than 40 percent of cyber events.
- More than half of the affected businesses reported losses between $250,000 and $1 million
- To pay for the cost of recovering from an attack, 38.3 percent of small business leaders reported for the first time they "raised prices" to address the financial impacts of an incident, creating a hidden “cyber tax” that helps fuel inflation.
James Lee, president of the ITRC, said the “cyber tax” shows just how much cybersecurity is impacting businesses and consumers.
“Now for the first time, small businesses are not absorbing the costs of cybersecurity and recovering from cyberattacks,” said Lee. “They’re passing that along in the form of price increases. We’ve never seen that before.”
Businesses also reported other impacts including loss of customer trust and employee turnover.
Only 38 percent of small businesses surveyed said they felt “very prepared” to protect their organization against a cyberattack.
Lee said businesses can protect themselves by creating a culture of security.
“There needs to be training,” said Lee. “It can’t be one-time training; it has to be ongoing training because the bad guys are always changing their tactics. So, we need to change our defenses.”
Lee said the number one source of data breaches are phishing attacks.
“That can be a text, email, phone call, video call or a fake website,” aid Lee.
Tips from the Federal Trade Commission on avoiding phishing:
1. Protect your computer by using security software. Set the software to update automatically so it will deal with any new security threats.
2. Protect your cell phone by setting software to update automatically. These updates could give you critical protection against security threats.
3. Protect your accounts by using multi-factor authentication. Some accounts offer extra security by requiring two or more credentials to log in to your account. This is called multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication makes it harder for scammers to log in to your accounts if they do get your username and password.
4. Protect your data by backing it up. Back up the data on your computer to an external hard drive or in the cloud. Back up the data on your phone, too.
