Last Sunday afternoon Kronos announced they were hit by a payroll ransomware attack. Kronos has informed their customers to expect outages in their payroll services for several weeks. They have advised customers to seek alternative ways to deliver payroll services to their employees. Kronos is also investigating whether any customer data was compromised.

What you can do

First things first is to strategize how you will pay your employees on time, or as close to on time as you can. I would suggest inviting in any legal counsel and financial counsel you work with to assist. You may even need to work directly with Kronos during this process as well. If you are a customer of Kronos, now is the time to dust off that business continuity plan.

Business continuity plans

Business continuity plans are used to help a business when there is a possible disruption to the business. These plans create the playbook for the steps and actions needed to minimize any disruption. To learn more about creating a business continuity plan, check out this article by Ready.

Third party data breaches

It feels as if 2021 has been the year of critical data breaches for third party providers. As we have talked about before you cannot always control the protection for a third party provider. There are things you can do to better be prepared.

  • Be vigilant of your accounts and check them for compromise
  • Know and understand your data
  • Quickly identify if your data is compromised
  • Regularly review your own incident response plan
  • Build relationships with your third party account managers or support team

Third party cybersecurity incidents may be out of your control, but your preparedness for them is something you can own. 

For more information on protecting your small business from cybersecurity threats, like this payroll ransomware attack, check out Small Business, Big Threat!

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