The West Virginia Manufacturing Extension Partnership and the West Virginia University Department of Industrial Extension will present a half-day workshop on cybersecurity Aug. 6 at the Holiday Inn on Dry Hill Road in Beckley, West Virginia.
The partnership Cybersecurity workshop will show small business owners how to identify potential cyber threats, how to protect information and employees from these threats and attacks, and what is required to be compliant with current federal cybersecurity standards.
Worldwide, cybercrime is responsible for a loss of $445 billion annually, with projections of more than $6 trillion in losses by 2022, according to a press release from the university. Cyberattacks have quickly become a growing concern for companies of all sizes and industries.
- Small- and medium-sized businesses are attacked about 4,000 times a day, with small manufacturing companies consistently being a top-five target.
- Up to 60 percent of small business that are successfully breached fail within the next six months.
- The loss of revenue and often, intellectual property, is too great for the company to survive.
Presenters for the workshop will be Pat Toth from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership and Chris May from Advantage Technology.
Toth, who is one of the top experts in the country on cybersecurity, is currently the Cybersecurity Program Manager at the NIST MEP. Toth was the lead for the NIST Cybersecurity Small Business Outreach and served as the chair of the Federal Information Systems Security Educators’ Association Technical Working Group, and chair of the Federal Computer Security Program Managers’ Forum. Toth has been involved with many computing and cybersecurity projects for the government and was a key member of the teams that developed the current cybersecurity standards.
May is an Information Security Consultant at Advantage Technology and works closely with executives and heads of departments to determine specific security needs and directives. May’s primary mission is to identify gaps in current IT practices, recommend best practice solutions to reduce risk and maximize business opportunities, and then successfully communicate those strategies to all levels of the workforce.
This assures a broad-based understanding and adoption of the solutions. Prior to Advantage Technology, May was an Operations Manager at Dupont Chemical where he worked on large scale integration projects. May brings a real-world approach to solving IT and cybersecurity problems.
Suppliers and contractors for the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration or NASA are required to be compliant with current cybersecurity standards as set by the NIST under the Federal Department of Commerce.
