Canadian-made device protects businesses against cyberattacks

As much as 90 per cent of Canadian small businesses are not backing up their data properly, meaning they are vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches, viruses, hacks, and even power outages. 

“Downtime is the enemy of small business,” Keith Green, co-founder of Unique Black Boxes Inc., says. “If your technology isn’t working properly, you may have to let everyone go home. It becomes expensive.”

With his partner Andy David, Green has built an affordable Canadian-made alternative to backup servers that provide ease of mind and ease of use to small business owners. The Unique Black Box works as both a backup server and a firewall that keeps copies of data and helps to protect the business from potential threats. 

A report from Mastercard released this year suggested that the average data breach for a Canadian business costs $5.64 million, and less than 40 per cent of businesses have the proper tools in place. 

In total, David says, cybersecurity breaches and other issues cost Canadians approximately $30 billion annually, though other sources suggest that number could be different.

Both Green and David reiterated that it is important to note there are no guarantees in cybersecurity, it is only possible to lower the risk of an attack or failure, but the chances are never zero. The Unique Black Box can take that risk lower than any off-the-shelf product available at an electronics store such as Best Buy. 

“A lot of the off-the-shelf has home-based firewall, which doesn’t have the intricacies that ours has to be able to use stateful packet filtering,” David says. 

Stateful packet filtering essentially makes sure all connections on a network are legitimate and safe to keep the user secure. 

“It locks out the bad guys that are going to steal your credit card information,” David says. “I’m not saying an off the shelf product from a store can’t do that, I’m just saying that they’re not designed with a small to medium sized business in mind.”

The technology used in the Unique Black Box is not capitalizing on trends or buzz words, and the designers are instead focused on making a reliable product that is intuitive for anyone at a small business to use. 

Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, with David and Green having just attended a trade show, finding their product to be one of only a select few that does not rely on AI to run properly. 

“We don’t necessarily need AI for what we’re doing,” Green says. “We’re just building the ability to back up your data and having the secret sauce inside. Once we’ve backed up your data, the part of the machine where it’s stored is turned off so it can’t be invaded by a virus.”