1850 – Stop Internet Crime with Dylan Evans of Simple Salt

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0:59with us right now dylan evans dylan you are the founder of simple salt you're found on the web at simple-salt.com i am so grateful to have you here because this is a pretty hot topic dylan thank you so much for joining us thank you very much it's great to chat with you all right what is this hot topic that we're talking about today what your area of expertise the work that you do. Sure. The FBI has been noticing, and I'm sure you have and all our listeners have as well. Internet crime is increasing. If Vanguard sold a mutual fund of Bulgarian crime rings, I would buy it. They've been getting big bucks, 40 % year over year growth.

1:45they're winning. And a lot of firms don't know what to do. And they're especially going to high cost solutions. And I would say it's clear the current approaches are not working very well. Yeah. Well, where do we go from here? Like thinking about this audience. So this audience probably deals with some sensitive information. I'd say most of us, you know, we have customer information. We've got certainly, you know, obviously if we think about most, say agency owner or consultancy or, you know, a SaaS company, I think all of us deal with some sense of information. Certainly we have data and systems and things that are very valuable to us That if those were compromised in some way, it could really be potentially devastating, not just for our livelihoods, you know, our businesses, but, you know, it could affect people's lives.

2:50for sure yeah i think there's some misconceptions that like this is scary and big and people don't know how scared they should be because they'll read about like what maersk's four billion dollar settlement because they were out of commission for like four or five months and they think could that happen to me and usually the answers are pretty simple but you're right it's highly contextual for the business. If you run a tire shop, you probably don't have a lot to lose. Like worst case, someone defrauds you for maybe a month's worth of revenue, if that's what you got lying around in the bank. On the other hand, if I'm getting a terrible divorce and my divorce lawyer loses my file to Facebook, right?

3:34It goes beyond financial for me. That's my whole life. Yeah. All right. I'm hoping Dylan that you could pick out of a hat maybe two to three things thinking about uh you know the persona of a uh of an smb founder which is a pretty common type of person that listens to this show um what are a few things that you say listen when it comes to best practices for security today here are probably a few things that some vulnerabilities that you have that i'm going to give you an assignment this week right You're going to work on this. What are those two to three things that immediately come to mind? I got two.

4:16One is a password manager. People have been telling you for 30, 40 years not to write your passwords down. They were wrong. Sorry. Sorry about that. The one I recommend, there are two. If you've got a Mac, get password something. I don't know. It's like the Lexus of password managers escapes me for the moment. I hear LastPass talked about a lot. One password, I think is another one. One password is like the Cadillac. Yes, thank you. One. That was the part I missed. The other one is Bitwarden. Bitwarden is coming up fast. They're like the Honda of password managers. They make sense for a lot of people that maybe don't want to spend on a Cadillac.

4:55But you're going to be putting your life into this thing. Your goal is to never type a password again. Because honestly, it's not worth your time to remember all this junk. There's easier ways. Yeah. There's a lot more here. Before we could get kind of to some other topics, let's talk about passwords just a little bit more. So there's obviously this password is kind of, you know, pretty typical. That's, you know, very, very common, you know, way that we've secured access to our valuable information. Then there's kind of next layers, I think, that we're seeing a lot. So two-factor authentication, I'd love to get your take on that.

5:30And then we're also seeing a lot more companies moving toward authenticators, right? Where, and this would look like you've got an authenticator software that you use. It's going to give you a revolving pin code that every 30 seconds it changes. So you have to log in using that. I'd love your take on these. This is moving fast. Like the advice on this has changed radically in the last three years and especially in the last five years. and I would say at this point, multi-factor is great, but if you've got a really strong password that only is in your password manager and it's 63 characters of random gibberish, that's pretty good.

6:13Like an extra token on your phone isn't going to help a lot more than that. It'll help a bit. If you are going to go MFA and you're going to say like, yes, I trust my life to this thing. Go big, go buy a YubiKey. They're like 40 bucks and they will give you better protection than anything on your phone ever can or will. It's well, at least until Google comes out with the next best thing, right? What did you say? You said YubiKey? Yeah. Y-U-B-I-Key. It's a little dongle you plug into your laptop or whatever. And through the magic of very complicated math, it does better than any code or any push to your SMS or something ever could.

7:03Yeah. Okay. So you have literally a physical key. I'm looking at this right now. I'm just doing a search. I see like Yubico offers one. Do you really care about that? Yubico is the one that sells YubiKey. Okay, got it. It's like Kleenex, right? They're the leaders. Google tried to come up with one because when they got blown open by the Chinese government, they said, yeah, we got to get on this. And they rolled them out to everywhere. Well, they're big enough. They were able to just insource the manufacturer. So they sell theirs as well. But YubiKey is the Kleenex. Yeah. Works with everything.

7:41Yeah. I'm on their website right now. It's$50, you know, all the way up to, I think, the most expensive one is$65. for 75 for individuals. So 50 bucks looks like the gold standard here. So this is the gold standard. Yeah. And now note, they make a mistake on their website. They'll sell you one at a time. This is a terrible idea because you always need two. Yes, like having for your car, right? You always need a spare key. Right. Because through the magic of math, you cannot call a locksmith on this thing, right? If you lose it, it's all gone. You're going to have to call every dang org whose access is tied into this thing.

8:23It protects you, but it also protects you from yourself if you lose it. So you provision two and you put one immediately into the safe deposit box at your bank. That's it. Yep. And you only ever take it out if you lose yours and you need to provision a new one. Yeah. Brilliant. This is cool. This is exciting. Aside from, so passwords alone, I mean, Dylan, if you could influence the world to get smarter about passwords, you think about how much cumulative damage could be prevented. This is huge for every business owner, you know, especially when you're thinking about, you know, multiple employees that have access and you're sharing passwords.

9:06That's not a good way to do that because password manager has you handled here too. Because for like six bucks a month, you can, or like maybe if you go the Cadillac version, you can provision six bucks a month per employee. You can put all the passwords, like you got a corporate account for buying. You just like click the button. You say, now Deb, the account manager has access to log in to the procurement website and buy the piping supplies or something. And then she leaves next week and you just say, and it's gone, right? She doesn't have access anymore. And she never knew it in the first place because it was impossible to remember, right?

9:45Because you did a good job and used a truly random string of gibberish, right? Yeah. This is really exciting. And I didn't even know, I'm learning already so many things. Aside from passwords before, I want to talk about, you know, what SimpleSalt is and who you work with. Any other things that you would recommend that business leaders, certainly founders, look into to improve the security? Maybe it's a best practice or something that you would recommend that they really seriously take. Well, what you recommend they take seriously starting immediately. Yeah, this one's a bit philosophical. It's a little less concrete.

10:21Stop doing so much. This one comes straight out of E-Myth, right? Yeah. You are probably doing too much. And this is a natural tension and friction when you grow. As you grow, you have to let go of stuff. And it makes sense that the highest risk things you let go of are kind of the last. You lag on those. So like finance and IT, these are really important things to get right. Can't double bill your clients. But that's where the risk of crime comes from. And so there are some excellent companies out there right now that will allow you to just step away. And through automation, there's some fintech companies out there that will just kind of do the whole thing.

11:12And then all you need is maybe a 10, 20-hour, a quarter fractional CFO to ride herd on the whole thing. And you have just eliminated so much. not only security risk, but operational risk, right? You don't have people clicking in and you don't have their credit cards anymore. They put it into their portal. You don't have to collect the evidence. PCI council's not going to come down on you like a ton of bricks and upcharge you for losing everybody's card number. Stop doing it all. Yeah. All right. Your website is simple-salt.com. Share a little bit about what your services are, who you work with and what you do.

11:55Yeah, we focus on high trust professional services firms. That is companies with a lot to lose. Like the lawyer I mentioned earlier, hire shops are not our specialty. They're probably gonna be fine. Most businesses are probably gonna be fine with that cyber rider. But if you are going to have, if you sell trust, if your most important stock and trade is trust, insurance policy is not going to help you, right? You're going to lose 40, 60 % of your revenue overnight if something bad happens with crime. And the insurance policy is not going to cover that kind of damage. They're going to help you recover.

12:36They're going to hire someone to get things clean again, but they're not going to be able to recover those customers. we help leaders of kind of mid-market mid-sized businesses with a lot to lose evaluate alternate strategies alternate approaches to the traditional high expense high-tech solutions that you usually find in like the big lists that you find on the internet how to be secure and then like it's just like here,$400 ,000 later, this is what you need. We offer some creativity and some very data-driven forward-looking decision support. So what does, in terms of like your engagement, like do people hire you for a monthly basis or who does that general, because like I'm looking at your services and this is really interesting.

13:29Like you go through compliance readiness, virtual risk officer, were coach, checkup, fishing. I'm curious, you know, kind of what, how these offers look or what they look like. Almost everything is recurring month to month. Do not give any discounts for the, you know, for buying a year at a time, because we really are sure of the value of what we offer. You know, we don't lose clients. And I would say we are there to help you not worry about something. We are there to easily explain. I mean, you could be four beers in and operating on one hour of sleep, and we specialize in helping you understand how worried you should be and what you can do about it.

14:16And like how worried you should be to the actual things that matter to you, right? Not just some long list of things wrong with your company that some nerd put together. Yeah. When somebody goes, Dylan, to simple-salt.com, what would you recommend that they do? It's designed to be scalable. Every service that you hit, you say, I'm interested. And it's a meeting. You say, I want to talk at this time. And we talk about what you need. So you get sent. Sometimes it's me. I'm doing the risk officer services right now for high profile clients, but it's, we're not going to waste your time. We don't have time to waste your time.

14:58We got, you got stuff to do. We got stuff to do. We're, you do not have to wait for some suited up sales reps to a discovery call. You're going to get this thing going. All right. Again, the website, simple dash salt, Dylan Evans, you are the founder. I really appreciate our conversation. Thank you so much for the tips. Great insights. It's been great having you on the show. Awesome. Thanks, Josh. It's been a pleasure.

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16:43This is something Bill Sproulers