Your organization's IT team, in-house or contracted, serves as one of its front-line defenses against cybercriminals. As cybersecurity attacks become more common in the affordable housing industry, there's no better time to evaluate your IT team's ability to:

We tend to fancy our passwords as undecipherable, but the data clearly shows otherwise: 60% of the breaches analyzed in Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report leveraged weak or stolen passwords. Cybercriminals aren’t just guessing our passwords; they’re making well-informed guesses. They can use several methods and tools to hack passwords, such as programs that record keystrokes, social engineering (e.g., phishing), and password dictionary databases with lists of the most commonly used password phrases.

There’s a spine-chilling uptick in cyberattacks—the FBI received a record number of cyber-related complaints last year, with reported losses of over $4.1 billion. A housing organization might not seem like the most lucrative target for a hacker (compared to a billion-dollar private sector business), but criminals are opportunists.

Despite a housing organization’s best efforts to boost cybersecurity, not all incidents can be prevented. To prepare for and respond to these breakthrough attacks, organizations should develop a cyber incident response plan outlining steps to minimize losses, fix weaknesses, and restore services.

Cybercriminals continue to target public and affordable housing organizations at an alarming rate. The good news? Protecting yourself doesn’t have to be complicated—or expensive.