CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) When gas prices got close to $4 a gallon, who wouldn’t want to save 10-cents if they could. As grocery prices continue to rise, you’d love a buy-one get-one-free deal.
Those are the most common perks for store rewards programs. But you have to give up your personal information – to be marketed to and tracked – if you want the deals.
As you probably know, Kwik Trip’s rewards program is finally up and running after a cyber attack on October 9th. It’s part of a broader computer disruption that impacted their store-to-store communications and their production facilities. The company says no personal information about their customers was compromised.
I understand exactly how this could happen. In 2019, Entercom, then the second-largest owners of radio stations in the country, was hit by a cyberattack. They couldn’t schedule their commercials, they couldn’t bill their advertisers, their satellite receivers couldn’t connect with their network broadcast programs. Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns TV stations in large cities, was hit by a cyberattack in 2021. They had news anchors during their local newscasts who explained that their teleprompters, part of a computer network where they read their scripts, was among the systems that were down.
So the least experienced radio part-timer who looks at infected websites during their shift, or the overnight TV control room operator who’s messaging god-knows-who infects an entire computer network. It’s always the weakest human link. The person who is least trained or who cares the least about following procedures who brings the whole system down.
No company can expect to fight off these types of cyberattacks. Their expertise is in some other area, not cybersecurity.
The one area of home was the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline. They paid the ransom. But the FBI was able to trace it, and got most of their money back. But when cyberattacks that originate in Russia or North Korea, we don’t have friendly governments to partner with. As maddening as it is, this is an area where the bad guys are far ahead of the good guys, and it’s unlikely to get better.
Chris Conley
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