#103: Cybersecurity For Micro Business

Episode: 103

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Chase Norlin, The CEO of Transmosis and The Creator Of CyberOps.

Subtitle: “What Small Businesses Need Is The Most Comprehensive Way Not Just To Protect Themselves, But To Recover If Something Does Happen.”

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-103-cybersecurity-for-micro-business-w-chase-norlin/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Chase Norlin, The CEO of Transmosis and The Creator Of CyberOps.

Chase is a serial technology entrepreneur that founded the Internet’s first online video sharing platform and one of the first video search engines, photo sharing services, and video ad networks. In this episode, he discusses how cybersecurity is especially for small micro businesses.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 3:46 : Chase’s Background
• 7:23 : Why Should An eCommerce Seller Care About Cybersecurity
• 10:37 : Damages of Cybersecurity Attacks
• 16:59 : Cybersecurity Misconceptions of SMBs
• 20:22 : How Can Sellers Protect Themselves From Cybersecurity Attacks
• 29:49 : Bogus Links and Fake Websites
• 34:50 : Invest On Your Cybersecurity
• 36:59 : Cyber Liability Insurance
• 39:13 : Cybersecurity Tips For Bootstrappers
• 43:05 : Signs Of A Cybersecurity Attack

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• RoboForm
• LastPass
• LifeLock
• https://transmosis.com/

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normanfarrar.com

Norman  0:02  

Hey everybody, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:20  

Alright, so on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about a topic not a lot of people discuss. Net cybersecurity. So Chase Norlin, CEO of Transmosis and creator of CyberOps, will be talking to us today about your cybersecurity. I think it’s going to be incredibly informative and I think this is something most of us should be talking more about. A lot of the times when we’re talking about Amazon, we’re not really thinking about cybersecurity. But when you have that eCommerce platform, let’s say it’s WordPress or Shopify, what can you do to protect yourself? So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Kelsey, where are you?

Kelsey 1:00  

Hello, hello.

Norman  1:01  

Hey Kels.

Kelsey 1:03  

How are you?

Norman  1:04  

You look different somehow. I’m not sure 

Kelsey 1:06  

I know right? It’s a bit of a different background here. If you took the camera and did a little panorama right now, there’d be about four different lamps circled around me because they don’t have the best lighting in here. But it’s coming along.

Norman  1:23  

Good. Good. Alright, we see we have some Oh, we got a Facebook user who we don’t know. But Miro, Mark, Yarrow.

Kelsey 1:33  

Alright. Yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode. If you’re new to the show, we have a Facebook group called Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. I’ll put the link in the comment section. But that’s where you can join the community, ask questions, meet some of the people on the chat like Marina and Fatiha. They’re all part of the group. Hello, welcome Manny, another Facebook user and for the Facebook users, we have the stream yard link that I’m going to send you guys in the chat, press on that link one time, and it fixes everything. 

Norman  2:07  

Then we get to see who you are. Yeah, if you want to be seen. Hey, Dr. Koz. 

Kelsey 2:15  

Yeah, so if you ever miss an episode, or if you want to see a highlight or the full episode, you can go over to our YouTube channel. It’s called Norman Farrar. That’s where you find everything. We put all the episodes there. All the highlights there and yeah, I think that’s pretty much it. Oh, we have our Clubhouse today, too.

Norman  2:37  

Yes, something new. It went really well last week. So we’re gonna do it again today. We’re gonna try to bring some of our guests back from last week, and just have a conversation. So Hey Simon, how’s it going?

Kelsey 2:51  

So I’ll be putting that link in the comment section as well. 

Norman  2:54  

Okay and on that note, if you have any questions, just throw them over to the comments section. We’ll get right to you and welcome Radd as well. Now, sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee and enjoy the podcast. Hey, Chase. 

Chase 3:15

Hey. Good morning. 

Norman 3:17

Good morning. So one thing, we do have a bit of an issue with Chase’s video. So unfortunately, you’ll just have to look at my mug. But on Apple, it’s a podcast, you don’t have to look at me. It’s just an audio stream anyways. But anyways, Chase, welcome to the show.

Chase 3:38  

Thanks Norm. How are you doing?

Norman  3:40  

I’m doing great. Why don’t you just start off by telling people about who you are and what you do?

Chase 3:46  

Yeah, great. Yeah, I’m Chase Norlin. I’m the CEO of Transmosis, CyberOps, technology entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. So I have a long history of building digital companies and last one, we built a pretty good sized digital advertising business in San Francisco and then I actually served as the basis for a parent company, which is Transmosis, which is what I run and we are the creator of CyberOps. But the history of it is that Transmosis is now a leader in the remote training and deployment of cybersecurity analysts. We are leading, some what we call workforce developer that actually grew out of the last business where we trained people on the job and we realized that there’s just a whole group of people that can make the transition into these fast growing technology careers that were outside the typical profile you would see in Silicon Valley and it was really inspiring to me and it became the basis for Transmosis. So the parent company, Transmosis, and I run around about six years, like I said, started in the Bay Area, received over about $15 million in state and federal funding across the country to like I said, to develop this now what is now a highly skilled scalable cybersecurity analyst training model. So we come to the world of cybersecurity from the business of training experts, security analysts, from people who weren’t called non traditional careers or were not in the cybersecurity industry. So that’s been just an amazing thing to watch these people’s lives transformed through this unique training model that we have, which is focused around real world experience and that became just to finish up that became the basis and the inspiration behind CyberOps, which we just launched a couple quarters ago, took us a couple years to build, and the core of that service, and we’ll talk a little bit about it as it relates to small businesses. This think of us almost as the ADT for cybersecurity, for small enterprises on record, for individual, more called semi professionals, if you will, but really focused around the small business owner and providing them with this 24/7 live security protection that you typically really only see at the Fortune 5000 level.

Norman  6:01  

Okay, so for years, and I’m talking over a long period of time dealing with the internet, I’ve been hacked, I mean, you name it so many millions, not million, so many times. I had to get involved with cybersecurity years ago, and even when I think and especially I know this with WordPress, I think, Oh, I’ll put this plugin in, it’s gonna work. I’ve been hacked, I’ve switched names, you name it, pointed folders over, you can still get hacked. So one of the things I want to do, there’s a lot of people that are listening right now. Look, a lot of us think of cybersecurity like maybe accounting or insurance, stuff you got to know if you do have people or friends that are either selling on Amazon or selling on eComm. We’re gonna be talking about how to protect yourself today, so go and maybe tag them or see if you can get them to come over and listen. A lot of people are not talking about cybersecurity, in my eyes it’s Uber important. So anyways, let’s just talk about the first thing is why should an Amazon seller, eCommerce seller care about cybersecurity?

Chase 7:23  

Yeah, well, we should actually distinguish first what you just brought up actually, when you were talking about your experience of having your website hacked, right and having an attack there or, or website issues related to WordPress, etc. That is obviously a type of cyber security breach, but that is really nowhere near the threat that we’re solving for here. So to answer your question, that’s attacking a website. The biggest issue that Amazon sellers, Shopify partners, etc have is they are part of this group of small business owners, right? Again, call that under 100 employees, they’re now the number one target attack for cyber criminals today and the majority of those attacks are happening will be called the endpoint, the endpoint being that user’s desktop, laptop or server, but typically, a desktop or a laptop and those threats are significantly exacerbated today, because of this whole work from home environment. So it’s really important to distinguish because what’s happened is the small business owners and again, whether you’re one person or 100, or 200, they’re now the number one target for attack from the cybercriminals for a bunch of different reasons. But really, primarily because of the last five years, the bigger companies or the medium to larger firms, obviously have the budgets for very expensive cybersecurity protection solutions, right? 24/7 security ops teams, internal people, and teams helping protect them. So certainly what’s happened is the organized criminal activity has moved to attack and go after the small guy and what’s also happened there is that we’ve gone from this world 5 or 10 years ago, that we’re all familiar with of this idea of this lone hacker in the basement going after you, that is entirely different today. This is organized criminal activity from all across the world, including inside the US. There really got in some cases, they’re really going into offices, and they’re just going down the line, going after every small business owner that they can find and so it’s important to understand that you really need to be aware of the potential threats and it is coming for you and you don’t want to be sounding too Doomsday here. But it is a statistical inevitability, like you were saying that you’re going to get attacked, but there’s a bunch of things you can now start thinking about and do to mitigate that.

Norman  9:50  

Okay, so I mean, that’s good to know. I’m curious. I was watching a show and it was one of these tape shows, or recorded shows that’s how old I am. So anyways, it was a recorded show I was watching last night, all of a sudden I saw the 60 minute advertisement come up saying, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah, there’s a cybersecurity threat that’s the biggest cybersecurity threat that’s going to affect your life you’ve never heard of or something and they were covering it. What was that? Do you know what’s going on?

Norman  10:25  

This was 60 minutes last night, they came on and they said that there’s this huge cyber security leak that’s happened and they can’t stop it and nobody knows about it.

Chase 10:37  

Yeah, I mean, there’s a variety of those and you’ve heard of Stuxnet as well and we’ve heard of the Solar Winds attack recently. I mean, I guess the big picture answer to that is there is always an ever increasing, it never stops and the level of sophistication in terms of the tools that these cybercriminals can use is now through the roof. I mean, that’s what this whole Solar Wind attack was about, they were able to secure what we call, some of the proactive threat hunting tools that good guys use, the good cybersecurity firms use to protect businesses have now been stolen by cyber criminals. It just really shows you the rapid pace of innovation on the cyber criminal side and the level of sophistication there, like I said, is through the roof and that’s why this is so incredibly important and dangerous and a lot of small businesses, they see the part of problem as a marketing problem or educational problem and that it’s very abstract, right? The idea of being hacked or attacked. It’s kind of hard to relate to and so that’s why we see and believe that a lot of these small business owners are dragging their feet until they get hacked and that’s not what you want to have happen and this is why this show is so great. A lot of this is about educating the small business owners of the significant liabilities that they face. So this is more than an abstract concept of, Okay, well, I might get hacked and if I do, I probably won’t and if I do, it’ll only cost me 5 or 10 grand, and I’ll move on. This is way beyond that. The level of first and what we call first and third party liability that small business owners carry, in particular, because many of them are, especially your audience are transacting online with partners, etc is absolutely through the roof. It means that in the old days, yeah, I might suffer some reputational damage. I’ll recover. Now it’s like, you might get ransomed for $100,000. They’re now using extortion. So they’re gonna extort you and so it’s not just a ransom demand, you get your data back, I think gonna extort you.

Norman  12:50  

Can you dig into that a little bit more?

Chase 12:52  

Yeah, I’ll get in a sec, and that was kind of the old days is this kind of going after you and reacting to that and just to address your quick question on extortion, they’re just going to threaten you to release data, essentially. So it’s no longer about, Okay, here’s a ransom, pay us 100 grand, we’re gonna get you your data back, it’s, we’re gonna actually release this throughout the internet, we’re gonna expose you and that’s gonna put you out of business, because the reputational damage is so large, but now it’s gone way beyond that. So think of that right there, that’s called the first party. That’s the direct damage to you, as a small business owner. Now, think of the third party liability, this is really kind of quite new and it’s very relevant to your audience, because they’re transacting with partners online and so what that means is all your partners are now potentially liable, and they will sue you if you are breached. This is one of the reasons why in 2019, 60% of all small businesses that were attacked went out of business six months later, because you’re getting sued all over the place, or big partners are going to drop you. So Amazon, Shopify, they’re just going to drop you. In some cases, if somehow, the attack gets through to them, which is what these hackers are now trying to do, or these cyber criminals are trying to do, you may be actually not just dropped by them and be sued by that really bad and then on top of that, again, this is all the third party liability. That’s all very new. This is what small business owners are not aware of and then the state and regulatory fines associated with that. So for example, you’ve heard of the New York Shield Act or the CCPA Privacy Act in the State of California. If you’re transacting online and you’re breached, and one of your customers resides in that state and that data is exposed through a breach. So again, not only are you liable for the first party damages I just described, all the third party damages and lawsuits I just described, but the state of New York and California and now soon many other states are going to find you out of existence and the fines are crazy. We’re talking six and seven figure fines. So you get a sense here, what this has happened is no longer this abstract idea that I’m going to get hacked or it’s not that big a deal. It’s now turning to a whole new animal, which is these small business owners, it doesn’t matter if you’re two people or 100, 200 people, the liability that you face today is massive, and it’s only increasing.

Norman  15:20  

This is running parallel with something. We talked about this on a much earlier podcast, but small businesses not complying with ADA and just simple solutions, who’s the easiest target? Small businesses, and the amount of lawsuits that were generated for ADA, the ADA act. I mean, you just have to find a company, spend a few bucks, and you’re covered. But people aren’t doing it. A lot of people don’t understand it until they watch the news one day, and find out that like 7100 lawsuits were just launched and it was shocking to me and immediately after, it was Wilfried Ligthart that was on and he was telling me about it the night before and I just went Alright, we’ll get you on to the podcast. It was like one of these special podcasts that we ran on a Tuesday and I just got all of our sites up with ADA Compliance. Well, yesterday, for example, I got a notice from PCI about just merchant compliance. There’s some huge fines there. So I had to do this whole bloody PCI merchant compliance test for a merchant account. But same thing here. These are things that small businesses, it doesn’t cost a lot to insure basically, I’m gonna say insure, but protect your website. But again, let’s go through some of the small misconceptions, or things that small businesses are doing wrong.

Chase 16:59  

Oh, yeah. That’s a good question. A lot of them. So one of the main ones is that, well, again, there’s this false sense of security, right? Which is, you think you’re safe, you think you’re protected? You think this is like the most common misconception. You think that an antivirus is enough to protect you, which is completely ludicrous. It’s beyond ludicrous. Or you think that Windows Firewall comes with your computer is enough to protect you, it couldn’t be further from the truth. So consumer grade antivirus, great, nothing wrong, those are good companies, etc. But when you’re a small business owner, and you’re doing all the activities that we’re talking about here, that liability is through the roof. This is no longer you just a personal account cruising around on Facebook, this is beyond that. So what it means is that antivirus software firewalls are nowhere near enough to protect you. It’s a common misconception, and you think you pay your, whatever, 200 bucks a year for your antivirus, you’re going to be good to go. Well, it’s not the case. In fact antivirus is missing a majority of these endpoint attacks. So for example, ransomware, like 70% plus of these ransomware attacks are coming through to the endpoint that the antivirus cannot see and the same with firewalls. We talk a lot about this in our marketing and so really, I think maybe the best way to think about it is first of all, technology is not going to protect you 100% anyway, let alone a consumer grade technology like that and so the ultimate, and this is why you see Fortune 5000 companies doing this, is it’s really what you want and again, this does require being very security conscious, and being able to commit a little bit more budget than you’re used to. It’s the combination of what we call artificial intelligence and we can talk a little bit about that, because there’s an amazing technology out there that we’re deploying, married to human intelligence and that’s why the best protected companies in the world you always hear about, they have a Security Operations Team or Security Operations Center and so that’s a new concept for small businesses. That happens to be, of course, what we’re out, helping small business owners with, we’ve been able to come up with a model that makes that cost effective, and talk about that later. But that’s where you want to be, you need to be having two layers of defense, as it relates to not just watching for potential attacks. Some of these attacks are getting really insidious or meaning that they’ll lay dormant in your computer for two or three months. That’s something that a lot of software is not going to detect. This is where the hidden component becomes so incredibly important. But that’s one of the biggest, basically misconceptions that’s out there and let’s see, Norm sorry, go ahead. I’m gonna end that thought there.

Norman  20:03  

No, no, again just keeping along those lines, like is there anything that the small medium sized company can do outside of just giving you a call and say, Hey, let’s get started. Is there anything that they can do to help protect themselves right now?

Chase 20:22  

Yeah, just and I’ll answer that and another, I think important misconception, I think, potentially among your audience is that these platforms are going to protect you. So think of Amazon, Shopify. I mean, they’re there to transact business and to protect themselves and they’re not in the business of providing cybersecurity protection and liability coverage to their customers and in fact, if anything, it’s inverse, right? If you’re breached, and that somehow affects their platform. Again, it could be difficult, but any other eCommerce platform, but should that happen? Again, not only you dropped, you’re probably sued out of existence. So there’s a misconception that because you’re operating on Amazon, or in that environment, that you’re safe, you’re not. Again, 70% plus, of these major breaches, ransomware attacks, extortion, events, etc, they’re occurring at the endpoint, that means your computer, and your computer is even more vulnerable today. Because it’s likely sitting at home, on your personal Wi Fi network and you probably got a bunch of IOT devices connected, right? Well, we got all these cool, different gadgets in the house, many of those made in China, not that we’re judging per se. But there’s a lot of security risks associated with that. So now you can kind of see, right? There’s so many entry points to attacking you at your computer, especially in a work from home environment that again, you’re basically I don’t want to sound Doomsday, but you’re the furthest thing from safe today. So to answer your question, and we don’t want to be too self promotional here, I’ll speak more of the industry at large. Historically, small businesses haven’t had access to this type can be like we talked about in beginning they haven’t had access to these types of commercial grade or Fortune 5000 grade protection systems primarily because it just been too expensive and the entire industry, as you probably know, focused around medium to larger sized businesses or SMBs. But an SMB, an enterprise cybersecurity company is a 500,000 person company. But that’s not in our estimations. That’s not a small business. So essentially, what’s been lacking up until fairly recently, is the ability to provide an essentially an enterprise class solution in a really cost effective format. It is something that we’re doing and I’m happy to speak to that, and also, it’s really never been delivered in a flexible monthly subscription as well. This is something that we’ve also pioneered in CyberOps, we think about this bringing this enterprise cybersecurity almost like an Amazon Prime such.

Norman  23:17  

Oh, it looks like we lost. Oh, you’re back.

Chase 23:20  

I’m sorry. You guys catch me okay? Sorry. There was a call there. 

Norman  23:27  

No problem.

Chase 23:29  

Yeah. So that’s, again, to kind of in a nutshell, what we’ve done, we just a brief blurb here. That’s exactly what we set out to solve at CyberOps is how do you bring this Fortune 5000 class security platform with 24/7 live aliens, just like you would almost like ADT, for cybersecurity, rolled up into a flexible Amazon like prime monthly subscription. That’s exactly what we solve for and there are other startups kind of getting into this world, I guess that small businesses have been overlooked here. But they’re incredibly vulnerable today, as you can imagine, especially struggling with COVID and then the other key piece, and you’ve talked about this Norm a little bit ago, which is, this is more than just about cybersecurity protection. So if you think about the small business owner, the small business owner, very different from an SMB owner, right? You wrote a 500 person company, versus a 5 or 10 person company. I mean, those are night and day, right? So, if 500 to 1000 person SMB,  they’re gonna have a cybersecurity consultant, or they may be working with other partners already, so they’re gonna understand that space a little better. A small business owner doesn’t understand that all they just want to be safe and continue upon their way and doing their business and so going to a small business owner and saying, Hey, we’ve got better protection for you than these other guys. Honestly, it falls on deaf ears. Yeah, we do. We do have for most cutting edge artificial intelligence technology that is married to a 24/7 security operation center and that is extremely powerful. But again, even that falls on somewhat deaf ears to the small business owner. So where I’m going with this is that one thing we’ve pioneered, I think it’s a good segue into the next potential topic is, Well, what does really matter to the small business owner? Well, I’m a small business owner, and I’ve been one before and I can tell you, someone coming to pitch me about better tech to protect me is not going to mean much, but pitching me and telling me that if something does get through, which I assume eventually will, how am I protected then, and so this is why cyber liability insurance is something that we launched, we’re one of the first companies to offer this fully integrated cyber liability insurance along with our technology with one of the world’s largest commercial insurance companies. So what that means is, something does get through, I know I’m protected. Well, I’m gonna have the funds to pay a lawyer or to potentially pay off the ransom if I have to or to restore my data, and all the business downtime, etc. That’s what really matters and so it’s protecting for both and that’s why it’s kind of a race to the bottom among a lot of cybersecurity software vendors who are out pitching this, I mean, it works, like I said, for medium to larger companies. But for the little guy, we believe what they really need is the most comprehensive way not just to protect themselves, but to recover if something does happen.

Norman  26:29  

Right. First, I’ve never heard of the insurance policy going along with it. So that’s kind of cool. One of the things I wanted to touch on, I just saw in a comment from Kelsey, there is a giveaway today. So we didn’t talk about it at the beginning of the show. Can you talk a little bit about the giveaway that you’re offering?

Chase 26:52  

Yeah, sure. So yeah, that’s actually a good segue. Cuz that’s how we sell our CyberOps service, you guys can all the listeners can check it out atTransmosis.com and you’ll see the link to CyberOps in there. It’s sold on a monthly subscription basis. So against kind of sold like you would McAfee actually, from the consumer antivirus. That was the idea behind it, which is to get it into a very easy to manage subscription model and so we are giving away two subscriptions, which is our retail value is $50 a month for those. So you can see it’s a very valuable service that typically is addressing small business owners who are under 100 employees, we’re giving away a year subscription for that.

Norman  27:38  

That’s fantastic.

Chase 27:39  

For two business owners.

Norman  27:41  

Fantastic and Kels, how do we enter for that one?

Kelsey 27:45  

Yeah. So to enter, #We love Chase in the comment section, you can post it across all social media, or if you’re watching on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, put it in the comments, I’ll be checking everywhere and you’ll be entered into a wheel at the end of the episode today.

Norman  28:07  

Okay, and we do have a hard cutoff time at 12:50 today.

Kelsey 28:11  

Yeah, that’s when we’ll start.

Chase 28:14  

What’s cool about that prize, actually, is that as soon as you’re activated, you have a 24/7 live team, United States based, watching your ass 24/7, so it’s gonna be a significant upgrade to any consumer antivirus that you might have.

Norman  28:33  

Alright, so once again, if you’d like to take advantage of this giveaway, it’s a pretty expensive giveaway, a full year subscription to the cybersecurity that we’re talking about today. Just put, #We love Chase, and two lucky people are gonna win that today. Also, just wanted to let you know, if you like what you’re hearing, just smash that like button, subscribe to our channel, we’d be grateful to you. Also questions, there’s got to be a ton of questions about cybersecurity. So please put them into the comment box, and we’ll get to them ASAP. I got a question about links and it’s kind of a multi part question. I get links coming in. I get comments coming in on blogs. I get people responding to a WordPress message that you might have contact us on this form. They send us over, Hey, whatever it would be, and they have a link in there. When people are reaching out on your website, that link could that cause a problem? 

Chase 29:49  

Yeah, big time. So that’s actually one of the more common ways that you’re going to see some of these ransomware attacks originate from someone clicking on a bogus link being on a fictitious website that looks like a real website, something’s downloaded to their computer, or might be triggered through an email. But essentially what’s happening is they’re looking to attack the endpoint. Again, like we keep talking about the end users desktop or laptop and that’s one of the more common ways that’s triggered and that happens all the time. I mean, it’s only increasing and people are just not used to some of the fakes are so strong, it’s hard to distinguish it that you’re not really on the website, you thought that you were on that website. So what that does is it triggers a cascade of events, because as soon as that attack, hits the endpoint, whether it’s a ransom malware, etc, basically, all hell breaks loose and so the whole idea is, well, of course, you want to prevent that. But you can’t prevent a lot of cases, employees clicking on the wrong email, right, or clicking on the bogus website, link and so that’s why again, that’s why this endpoint protection is so incredibly important. So think of antivirus is like the very baby steps of protecting the endpoint, like the most entry level way you could possibly do do that. The next level up is I call it endpoint detection and response. This is what Fortune 5000 companies are typically using. The next level above that is essentially the same thing, endpoint detection and response, but with artificial intelligence, because AI is incredibly powerful, as it relates to detecting and stopping these threats. But that’s what happens, it triggers that cascade event and then if you’re on a network, or you’re connected to other employees, etc, they can make their way now you’ve got a network problem and that can create a whole nother layer of issues. But all it takes is one computer to be compromised for your data to be stolen, extorted, etc. So that’s why it’s so incredibly important to have that endpoint protection backup. Because again, it’s becoming easier and easier, the cybercriminals are just getting better and better at doing these fake websites and attacking your endpoint.

Norman  31:57  

So when you’re using a subscription model like yours, are you covering the subscription, is it for the website? Or does each individual person that has an email account, also have to sign up for a subscription?

Chase 32:13  

Yeah, so we’re not protecting websites and your website protection has been around a long time. There’s a lot of great companies doing that and obviously, if you’re transacting through your websites that are that’s something you’re gonna want to do. WordPress, we’ve talked about some issues there. But WordPress is, over time getting better and better at protecting our customers. So that’s not what this is about, okay, it’s about how you protect your computer, that’s what it’s about. They’re going after your computer. That’s where all the sensitive information is, that’s what your connections to others are. All your accounts online and the cloud are attached to it. That’s why it’s 70% plus of these ransom type attacks, and malware type attacks. So that’s what matters the most is being able to watch that computer 24/7, and like I said, again, that’s only getting worse in a work from home environment where your computer is now connected to all kinds of other insecure stuff. Normally, you’d be in an office environment right? You’d have a company issued laptop, and you’d be in a way more secure office environment. So now, not only are they targeting you anyway, but it’s even you’re even more vulnerable on this in a home environment.

Norman  33:20  

Right. Okay, I get it. I thought it also covered the corporate website. So that’s a good point and I mean, this is even Okay, now and now it’s 100%. Clear. Alright, so here’s another question then. I get links or messages coming through from Facebook. Okay. Wilfried, the same guy that was talking to me about ADA was saying, Man, so many people’s computers get compromised through Facebook, just messages, like from friends, if you friend a person that might be a hacker, all of a sudden that could affect your Facebook account, but it can also affect your computer. Have you heard about anything like that? It’s the same thing.

Chase 34:07  

Well yeah, again, same thing, right? Any website, right? Anything you click on, any email that you get. Everybody, not everybody, 70% plus, they’re going after your computer, that’s where you’re the most vulnerable often, especially in a home environment. So Facebook is just one example obviously, of that it can be any type of website.

Norman  34:27  

Okay. Alright, so let’s go back to your product, your app. Will that protect you against an assault coming from Facebook? Is it protecting your computer? Oh, no, I was just gonna say so it protects you basically on anything coming into your computer.

Chase 34:50  

Yeah and that’s the entire point is, yes, you want to protect your website. But a lot of these partners or people are using third party tools like WordPress or Shopify, etc and those platforms are going to get more and more secure over time, and they are which is great. But again, that’s not where the ransom attacks or the malware or the extortion, they’re going after you. For example, a lot of this started with going after just hacking your computer, looking at your photos, maybe got some weird photos on there, a lot of people do. Or maybe you go to some weird websites, all that is exposed now. You think about how dangerous that is, whether you’re a one person or 100, let alone all the credit card information, personal information, your small business information and so that’s why it’s the primary target. That’s why you need to make those whether it’s us or somebody else, you need to make investments and some more increased investment in endpoint security and I believe in cyber liability insurance, ideally having those come together. Because the stats point to eventually something happening to you and so that’s where it’s important to have ransomware and cyber liability coverage in case that does happen, because like I said, it is a what do you call that, it’s a Doomsday type event, you’re talking about a very high likelihood that you’ll be out of business shortly after.

Norman  36:11  

Oh my gosh, wow and you know what, when you first came on, I was thinking we were going to go down a different path. I had no idea. We were talking about subscriptions for individual computers and the way you’re describing it right now. One of the things that I’m thinking about right now is I have something like a Roboform or LastPass, or whatever it’s called One manager, whatever it is one password manager. If somebody gets into your computer, you have that Roboform, let’s say, Yeah, they can hack that, now they got everything.

Chase 36:52  

I mean, think about that, right? Now, your access to your Bank of America accounts, right?

Norman  36:57  

Yeah, all your identities.

Chase 36:59  

Identity theft, all that. So exactly, that’s why number one, you want the best defense against that 24/7, and number two, the chance that something does happen, you need to have a backup liability policy in place and you’re gonna see this happen more and more. I mean, it’s already happening. So cyber liability insurance is the fastest growing category of commercial insurance today and it’s making its way to the small business owners. So I think we’d like to think we’re one of the pioneers of having that, like the first integrated solution for that and over time, this is going to be so we believe so incredibly commonplace. I mean, right now, it’s the wild west, insurance companies are more scared, rates are going up. There’s more tax, right? They don’t know what that liability looks like. There’s more ransoms and so it’s chaos, and nerve wracking and uncertain for insurance. But the overall long term market opportunity for protecting the long tail, if you will, SMEs and small businesses is massive. So we believe it’s an inevitability that almost every small business owner in the next five years is going to have some level of cyber liability protection.

Norman  38:13  

Wow. Okay, so a lot of times in this podcast, we have two types of people. The people that can see that letting an expert do it, well, maybe that’s spending good money is not a bad thing. So spend it on an expert and then we have people that are more bootstrapping it, they’re just starting off, they don’t have that extra money to spend. So they don’t have the extra 25, 50, $100, or whatever it is, yeah. What are some tips that you can give to those people, the bootstrappers, that can’t use your or can’t afford your platform right now? Right now, for me, I’m saying that I’m going to buy your product, because I can’t afford not to have your product or your app. But for those people that are just bootstrapping it, spent 1000s of dollars on their inventory, and just need a few tips. What kind of advice can you give him?

Chase 39:13  

Yeah, well first, I would say that it’s maybe not as unaffordable as you think, in the sense that you gotta start thinking about it. I honestly think you got to start thinking more about insurance and every small business owner is familiar with insurance and all of them have to carry liability insurance. So it’s already something you’re familiar with and really, all we’re saying is you want to make a larger investment there and the technology is part and parcel of that, obviously, to mitigate that liability. But that’s a better way to think about it, because that’s like I said earlier, it’s the abstract concept of an attack is the reason why everyone’s dragging their feet. Right? So however, that aside there are obviously small business owners that maybe under 10 employees or your independent contractor what we call sole proprietorship, right? You’re selling online and whatever the scenario may be, there’s a ton of small things you can do from Password Manager to having a third party sorry, having external physical hard drive storage in case your computer is hacked. We actually publish a bunch of tips and tricks on our blog, which we recommend checking out. So it’s transmosis.com, and you’ll see the blog link, we post a ton of really useful information related to just everyday things that you can do, and there are everyday thing that you can do and like I said, you’re not gonna upgrade to something like this, then antivirus solution is a very common thing, it’s not gonna protect you to the extent that you need long term, but it’s still nonetheless a relatively low cost option and a good start.

Norman  40:48  

Chase, can I interrupt you for a sec? 

Chase 40:48

Yes, please go ahead. 

Norman 40:50

Okay, so every time I call Mac or Apple, and I call Apple often, okay, but I’ll ask maybe every three to six months, do I have to put virus protection on my Mac and they 100% of the time say, no? Yeah. Is that true?

Chase 41:13  

I mean, actually I haven’t called Apple and asked them about that. I mean, Apple generally speaking is a more secure platform than Windows based machines, everybody’s kind of known that historically more difficult because it was a more closed environment, and harder to attack and that’s probably one of the reasons that they say that and they’re going to be rolling out their own security products. I mean, they’re already pretty strong security protocols. So I don’t think they want to endorse a third party. Again, just give you my personal opinion on that. But overall, like I said, if you look at some of these tips and tricks, there is a good, a higher grade consumer antivirus solution is a good start, you’re at least on the right path there, right and you want to identity theft protection, that’s very interesting. Alan Norton at Lifelock ,guys have done a nice job of Lifelock in particular, pioneering that category, that’s certainly a big threat and the downtime associated with your identity stolen is definitely something to be thinking about. So I think that’s like, that’s a good next baby step. But if you’re a real business, I mean you’re a corporation, you’re transacting online, you’re putting effort in to grow that business, the liability that you’re carrying is insane and that needs to be addressed more sooner than later. Because it’s not an exaggeration that you could be going out of business a lot sooner than you think and it’s already times are tight anyway with COVID and small businesses are under tremendous financial pressure as well. So it’s counterintuitive that it’s not yet not an ideal time to make those investments. But if you’re in it for the long haul, it’s something you want to really seriously consider.

Norman  42:51  

Very good. Kelsey, do we have any questions?

Kelsey 42:55  

Yeah, we have a few questions. Let me see. So from Manny, are there any first signs that you might notice when you’re just hacked for the first time? 

Chase 43:05  

Well, that’s a good question, actually. So that’s part of the problem, like things like zero day attacks, where they’re laying and wait, sitting in your hiding and files, for example, inside your computer, that’s something that we do is something called honey potting is what these Fortune 5000 companies use, because they’ve got these security teams, we actually provide that to our small business customers, what that means is we actually lay traps, lay traps for cyber criminals. So we put out like, for example, bogus password folders to see if we can get them to come look for a password folder inside your computer and then we immediately stop them and then identify them and basically reverse attack them, what the big guys to use. So in a lot of cases, you don’t know this is happening. I mean, the biggest problem is that if you looked at, for example, your router and the number of potential bogus IPs that are knocking on your door, and now knocking on your digital door, if you will, through your Wifi at home now. Yeah, these guys are getting better with more secure routers. If you see that, you will get a sense of what I’m talking about here. There’s dozens a day of these random IPs, who knows where they’re from trying to see if there was an open door into my computer and so you look at that, that’s when it starts getting the most people don’t look at their IP traffic inside their router. So anyway, the answer is it’s you don’t see it all the time until it’s too late.

Kelsey 44:36  

Okay, great. Let’s see the next one. Is your service only available to US sellers?

Chase 44:43  

Great question. We sell the product internationally. We start off US based but we sell it and provide the service in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all across South America as well. But all of our security analysts are US based. That’s an important thing because if you start digging into security operation centers and teams, you’ll see a lot of this is outsourced to Asia, Philippines and India. That is not again, not to judge, but that’s not what you want. You want US based security analysts.

Kelsey 45:11  

Okay and this is from Michelle, is it protection for the IP address?

Chase 45:16  

Okay, I think she’s asking there is a protection from the website, essentially. So she should probably clarify that question because that could mean a website. It could be for her home computer. But the answer is endpoints, like I said earlier, so we’re protecting that endpoint, that desktop, laptop within your work from home environment or in the office.

Kelsey 45:42  

Okay, and I think we answered one of these already from Fatiha. The basic steps we should keep in mind, if we haven’t got a basic or active subscription.

Chase 45:54  

What was the question?

Norman  45:55  

Yeah. We’ve just answered that one. 

Kelsey 45:58  

Okay and then last one from Fatiha. How is your service different to all the other major services out there?

Chase 46:05  

Okay. That’s a great question. First of all, there are very few major services, and we’re doing this. So it’s coming and we believe or we know, we’re a pioneer in this area. Most of these services are for medium to larger companies, or classic SMB market, which like I said, is like a 500 person company. So bringing this enterprise class product with a 24/7 security team with completely integrated cyber liability insurance, it really just hasn’t existed in an affordable, flexible monthly subscription model. So we’re one of the first to offer this to your guys, Small Business market.

Norman  46:40  

Okay, very good. So Kelsey, let’s get to the wheel of Kelsey.

Kelsey 46:48  

Alright, so if anyone hasn’t entered yet, you’ve got maybe like a minute left, put in #We love Chase if you want to be entered into a draw for a year long subscription with Transmosis. But I’ll start, I’ll just double check everything and okay, I think we’re good. Okay, so I’m going to share my screen. 

Kelsey 47:33  

Ready to go. So we got two giveaways. Is that correct? 

Norman 47:40

Yes, there’s two. 

Kelsey 47:41

Yeah. Okay. So 321. Okay, Michelle. 

Norman  47:51  

Michelle gets one. Congratulations, Michelle.

Kelsey 47:54  

Number two. Manny.

Norman 48:06

There we go. 

Kelsey 48:09

So close. Okay. So Michelle, and Mandy, congratulations on your prize.

Chase 48:14  

Michelle and Manny, you guys gonna be really buttoned up here soon. 

Norman  48:18  

That’s perfect and all you need to do is get your information over to Kelsey and then he’ll contact Chase with all that information.

Kelsey 48:25  

So you can email me at k@lunchwithnorm.com. So Michelle and Manny, I’ll reach out to you and we’ll get the information over to Chase.

Norman  48:34  

Okay, so Chase, I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to join us over at Clubhouse at 1:30. But we are having a Clubhouse room opened up. We’re going to be talking to our guests from last week as and today, if Chase can join us. I’m not sure. Are you going to be able to join us?

Chase 48:52  

I can’t. I didn’t have that on my calendar. Sorry about that.

Norman  48:55  

Okay. Well, maybe next Monday, if you are able to get on. We’re going to be having every guest from this week on next Monday as well. 

Chase 49:04

Okay, cool. 

Norman 49:05

But anyways, I just wanted to thank you for coming on and talking about cybersecurity. I learned a lot. I didn’t know we were going to go down certain rabbit holes and I’m glad we did, it clarified a lot of things for me.

Chase 49:17  

Awesome. I enjoyed being on the show. Thanks Norm, Kelsey, appreciate it.

Norman  49:21  

Hey, you’re welcome. So look, we’re on time and you can even get to your next call. How’s that?

Chase 49:26  

Beautiful. Hope everybody enjoyed it. Feel free to reach out if anybody has any questions.

Norman  49:30  

Alright. Thanks a lot, Chase. Okay, everybody. So that’s the end of the show. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I learned a lot. As a matter of fact, I don’t use Chase’s app. I am right after this show, just like Wilfried going to be joining and I’ve got a bunch of websites that I’m going to get onto or not websites, a bunch of computers, my team, I’m going to get this going. So I mean, what he was telling us we’re talking about so important and the types of lawsuits. I had no idea about that. But anyways, Kels, what do you got?

Kelsey 50:08  

Okay, so we have our Clubhouse today, it is at 1:30pm, Eastern time. I’ll put the comments again in here on Facebook and YouTube. But also, all of this information is on the Facebook group. So please go there, join there, and you’ll have access to all the links. We’ll also make this a Facebook event in the future. So you can have the links available there too. But also, so go over there. The Facebook group is Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA eCommerce Collective. That’s where everything is, I highly recommend you go there. If you’ve missed today, if you’re watching, if you’re a new user, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you’ve missed the whole episode, go over to our YouTube channel. It’s Norman Farrar, just as you can see here, this is our username. That’s where all of our highlights and full episodes are. You’ll find everything. If you want to check out our first episode, which I highly recommend to see how far we’ve come. It’s always good to see. I know Norm enjoys that episode..

Norman  51:16  

I love it.

Kelsey 51:18  

Yeah, so that’s basically it for me. Congratulations to the winners and I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. I think it’s a super important topic that not a lot of people are talking about. Right? 

Norman  51:34  

Then on Wednesday, we’re gonna have OMG Commerce Chris Brewer back. He was great last time he was on. This time, he’s gonna be talking about Google marketplace, the possibilities and the pitfalls with dealing with a Google marketplace and the opportunity for Amazon sellers. So tune in on Wednesday for that and tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time and thank you everybody for enjoying the show. Thank you for being part of the community and we’ll see you next time.