Enlightening Event – Cybersecurity: How to Protect Your Business

By Kathy Wheadon

Financial Planner’s Association of SF hosted a very enlightening event on September 19 – “Cybersecurity: How to Protect Your Business” at the City Club of San Francisco.

Led by Craig Watanabe, compliance and cybersecurity expert, this one-hour session described practical, economical and effective safeguards that firms can employ to protect their businesses from cyberattacks. Cybersecurity is a significant regulatory and business risk that affects nearly all firms. Craig laid the groundwork by explaining regulatory expectations and then identified cyber protections and safeguards that can be deployed at firms, including disk/file encryption and multi-factor authentication. 

Craig left attendees with three key takeaways:

1. One of the best defenses is disk or file encryption to protect ‘data at rest’;
2. Two-factor authentication should be used wherever possible. Two-factor authentication includes the use of challenge questions, sending texts with access codes, image recognition and key fobs/tokens; and
3. User awareness training is one of the most critical components of cybersecurity. The use of phishing tests and training is key to addressing this risk.

By the end this fascinating presentation, everyone in attendance had a solid understanding of how to employ defensive strategies such as defense in depth and the principle of least permissions.