ABOUT KEVIN PARVIZ:
Kevin Parviz, Ph.D., is a detective/corporal with the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office and a longtime specialist in digital forensics and cybersecurity. With more than 27 years in law enforcement and over 22 years conducting computer and mobile-device forensic examinations, he has worked on hundreds of investigations. Parviz has also served for more than nine years as a Task Force Officer with Homeland Security Investigations, with a focus on human trafficking and child protection investigations. His work has earned numerous federal, state, and local commendations.
Parviz holds a Ph.D. in Information Assurance with a focus on digital forensics and has more than a decade of experience teaching computer forensics and cybersecurity-related courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has testified as a computer-forensics expert in numerous Michigan and federal criminal cases. Kevin is also multilingual, with proficiency in several languages.
ABOUT ANDY LABARRE:
Andy LaBarre was first elected to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners in 2012, representing District 7, located in the eastern half of the City of Ann Arbor. Andy is a proud Democrat. He served as Vice Chair of the Board of Commissioners and previously served as Chair of the Board (2017-18), Chair of the Ways and Means Committee (2015-16), and Chair of the Working Session Committee (2013-14). Andy lives in northern Ann Arbor with his wife Megan (a teacher at Dexter Community Schools), son Declan, daughter Delaney, and dogs, Monster and Frankie.
Andy now serves as Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations for the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber and is David Fair's co-host for "Washtenaw Business Lens."
RESOURCES:
Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU, and it is time for our monthly look at the business community in Washtenaw County. I'm Caroline MacGregor, and welcome to Washtenaw Business Lens. Each month, we partner with the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber to look at how the news of the day impacts the local business community. Andy LaBarre is Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations for the Chamber, and he is a part of each month's conversation. Thank you for joining us, Andy!
Andy LaBarre: Caroline, thank you for having me! Good to see you again!
Caroline MacGregor: We're going to be looking at cyber security and how it impacts small businesses in general. Today, we are joined by Washtenaw County Sheriff Detective Kevin Parviz. Thank you so much for joining us today!
Kevin Parviz: Thank you, Caroline! It's a pleasure to be here!
Caroline MacGregor: The subject of cybersecurity is increasingly on the minds of businesses. Tell me a little bit about what businesses are facing today. How big is this threat?
Kevin Parviz: I started doing this cyber crime investigations back in the early 2000s. And I would say the number of threats have decreased tremendously. I believe that all these programs, such as yours, and basically the public education has helped tremendously. However, for the most part, cyber crime is actually getting to be more and more sophisticated. It's one of those things that you can't just get your guard down. You have to just constantly pay attention to the evolution of different types of cyber crimes.
Caroline MacGregor: So, tell us about some of the emerging threats in the cyber world and how businesses can remain more updated on these topics.
Kevin Parviz: Yes. The emergent ones are especially the foreign actors, the Iranians, Russians, and North Korean cyber security criminals, and there are additional ones. The private sector has actually joined in. If you want to call them the Mafia of the Internet, they do exist.
Caroline MacGregor: The Mafia of the Internet?
Kevin Parviz: Yes, that's what I call it. And people that came up with ransomware, these are actual mobsters that actually get the money and maybe the government gets a kickback, but these are actual criminals.
Caroline MacGregor: So, what can businesses do to proactively protect themselves against cyber scams if they are targeted?
Kevin Parviz: I would say that there is one generalized way of approaching this. So, I actually used to teach here at Eastern, cybersecurity and incident response. Incident response, I'm going to just condense an entire semester into six words.
Caroline MacGregor: All right. I'm sure all students would like that.
Kevin Parviz: So, incident response starts with preparation, and then you have the detection, trying to see what kind of malware, for example, is getting into your system. The next step is the containment. That is when you have malware that's on one computer. How do you contain it, so it doesn't spread? Then there's the eradication. That is how you get rid of that malware. And then, there's recovery. And then, the last step is the lessons learned. To me, I always told my students, 99% of this is the preparation. Just think of it as a loaded gun. How much preparation do you have to put into place so that, God forbid, a child can't get a hold of it? Because once the child does get ahold of it, that's where the other five words come into the picture where it wasn't really necessary for that to happen. And I can break down the preparations into different stages.
Caroline MacGregor: Like, what would those be?
Kevin Parviz: So, for example, we already know that we should limit our social media exposure. However, for businesses, they think, for example, if they post something on LinkedIn, they're getting some free advertisement. One case that I had was they actually said that they had a new big contract with another company. And that's a big no-no to me. If you are mentioning who the big boss is, the CEO is, the CFO is, or the accountant, as the bad guy, I just collected some free information about your organization. I can send you an email from that contractor that you just advertised. All I have to do is to create a website with one skewed letter that you won't recognize in my email, and I'll send you an email on the behalf of that new contractor. Now, I know who your financial organizer is or your accountant is and send them an email saying, "Change the bank account." And you have a new bank account. And this is an actual case that happened. Over a million dollars was lost in this, where the company that was victimized, posted all of that, including their new contract on LinkedIn. And the suspect was out of South Africa. We tracked him down. And we could not get much cooperation to follow up on it. So, that was a million dollar loss.
Caroline MacGregor: Andy, you're obviously out there around a lot of businesses. Have you come across many business owners that have suffered the consequences of cyber attacks?
Andy LaBarre: Yeah. Unfortunately, all of them deal with it to some degree. And as Detective Parviz said, there is a paradigm here where to succeed in business in 2026, you have to be plugged in online, sharing content, driving customers to your website and your product. And at the same time, you are multiplying the opportunities by which you can be abused with these sorts of various scams and so forth. So, it's something that all of our members deal with to some degree. That runs the gamut from international giant corporations to just a sole proprietor who's making a living locally here who has an online presence. And part of the challenge too, Caroline, is the commercial transactions of today's world, there's no escaping the reality of having that online and connected. It's no longer just a cash economy the way it used to be.
Caroline MacGregor: Yeah. So, the more exposure you have, which is kind of what's needed for business to get more business, the higher the risk is. So, does it come down to having the better techies on your side to delve into?
Andy LaBarre: I think what we've seen with our Chamber members is folks are trying to get that preparation part right, but a big component of that is being educated as a business owner and operator, in terms of what is the threat environment. How do you stay up to date on that? And just candidly, how do you know enough to know when you don't know enough? We're really fortunate to have resources here in this community, like Detective Parviz and others. But staying on top of that, that's, in some ways, a full-time operation for any business owner.
Caroline MacGregor: I was just going to say that that's got to be very expensive for most businesses, but certainly a vital part of their setup in order to protect themselves.
Andy LaBarre: I think you're exactly right that it is an expense. Unfortunately, it's one of those you can't go without. And as Detective Parviz has mentioned with the instance out of South Africa, one successful scam has a detrimental impact that's far beyond in terms of its scope for a small business. So, a million dollars to a multinational global corporation is no small thing. But if you're a mom-and-pop shop, that can be just exponentially detrimental.
Caroline MacGregor: Detective Parviz, let's talk about passwords--you know, weak or stolen passwords. This is kind of a nightmare area because even remembering all of our passwords for many people is quite a headache. There's just so many steps now that we have to go through, especially at a university. What advice would you give there? And what are you seeing as far as attacks or stolen passwords?
Kevin Parviz: Yes. I highly recommend the two-factor authentication when you have an app on your phone and you actually enter the code that vanishes in usually a minute. I also prefer having a hardware security key. Those are like the UV key. It looks like a thumb drive.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay.
Kevin Parviz: And you insert it into the computer, or you can use it as a near field, kind of you can wave it on the back of your phone. And it replaces the two-factor authentication app that you have on your phone. It's better in that, let's say I get a spam email and it's asking for, for example, my password for something. And it looks authentic, but the Gmail, that L in Gmail, is actually a numeral one, so it's a spam, but I don't see it. The hardware key actually detects that that's a fake website. In addition to that, you have to have it physically in your hand to log into something, so somebody across the world in a different country can't log in for you. They have to have that physically in hand. The only trick with that is that I have like three duplicates of that, because if you lose that, you lose everything. I have to warn you about the quantum computing coming around. Keep in mind that everything is based on zeros and ones to a quantum machine. I don't want to get too technical, but a bit is both zero and one.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay.
Kevin Parviz: So, a password is meaningless to a quantum machine, it can bypass it instantly.
Caroline MacGregor: So, how do we protect ourselves against that?
Kevin Parviz: So, right now, the only thing we have is what's called a pass-less key. So, you don't have a password. You actually have a key that sits, for example, on your phone. You don't actually have to memorize a password. Right now, that's still under development. I don't want to be an alarmist, but we're at a phase where, very soon, passwords are going to be meaningless.
Caroline MacGregor: Andy, have you heard of any cases of businesses in Washtenaw County facing threats from inside or from employees who perhaps accidentally expose information or, less commonly, steal it?
Andy LaBarre: Sure. Unfortunately, that is something that happens here and happens sort of everywhere now. I think it's an organizational reality. But, in today's world, businesses just can't afford not to take it seriously on the front end, or else, unfortunately, many times, they're looking at far more expensive outcomes.
Kevin Parviz: What I do in the morning when I wake up, I have alerts for cyber crimes, the latest and the best. And they pop up on, if you're on Apple News or if you are Google News, you can actually set that up. I'm reading them every morning. The first five minutes of my day is that.
Caroline MacGregor: So, you have an enjoyable breakfast every morning.
Kevin Parviz: In this day and age, that's the way it has to be done. And then, for the employers, I would say they have to revoke any fired employees' credentials right away. I've seen that a lot employers forget to do that could do some severe damages. And then, last but not least, I would say make sure that every employee has just access to what they need to do. I cannot emphasize that. I know I mentioned it before, but I had one case where every employee at that institution had access to the server. They were all admins. And one of them went rogue. To this day, I don't know which one, because once you have the full control of your server, as I call it, the Godbox, you can actually wipe all your traces of hacking into the system as well. So, things to be aware of.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay. That is Detective Kevin Parviz with the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department. He's a cyber security expert, and he's been our guest today on Washington or Business Lens. This regular conversation series is brought to you in partnership with the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber. And each month, we also hear from the Chamber's Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations, Andy LaBarre. Andy, look forward to seeing you next month!
Andy LaBarre: You bet, Caroline! Thanks!
Caroline MacGregor: I'm Caroline MacGregor. And for more information on Washtenaw Business Lens and today's topic, just stop by our website at WEMU.org. This is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU.
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