5 minutes with Laura Bruck, vice president of marketing, EZShield
EZShield is a valued client of St. John Properties, headquartered at Greenleigh at Crossroads in Middle River.
Baltimore Business Journal | Jonathan Munshaw
Company: EZShield
Position: Vice president of marketing and solution strategy
Age: 46
Where she grew up: Columbia
Education: Towson University
Understanding modern cybersecurity threats can be difficult for anyone, even the most experienced of businesses.
That’s where Laura Bruck comes in.
As vice president of marketing for Baltimore-based cyber security firm EZShield, it’s her job to take topics than typically be filled with jargon and complicated topics, and distill them down for the average person.
Bruck, in addition to promoting EZShield’s products and services, also runs its website, FightingIdentityCrimes.com. It’s there that Bruck writes blog posts and articles designed to educate business owners and individuals about current cyber security threats, and what can be done to combat there — and where EZShield can fit into those solutions.
Bruck worked in the education field for 20 years before coming to EZShield in 2009. She said the transition was difficult at first, but she was looking for a new challenge and to tackle a topic that she wasn’t necessarily familiar with — something her readers and clients relate to.
How did you come to work for EZShield?
I have not always been in this industry. I was actually in the education industry for about 20 years, I’ve been in this industry for about nine years.
Honestly, I was looking for a chance, and nine years ago, [cybersecurity] wasn’t as hot of a topic, but it was still an interesting topic. Through the years, obviously, so much has happened in terms of breaches and the pace of these things has really evolved.
What are some specific services that EZShield offers?
Cybersecurity is really broad. As a company, our services are about protecting the consumer and small businesses from identity crimes like fraud and identity theft.
For example, helping a small business in the event that they’ve had a breach. But we’re not a malware company, we encourage people to make sure they have antivirus, but our services are focused on three areas: secure, monitor, restore.
We’re giving the end customer tools to help them secure their identity. A big part of that is education. In light of a big breach happening, we’re sending out newsletters and posts state, “here are the facts, and here are the steps you should take.”
On the back end, we’re providing resolutions. For example, we have individuals who help someone to help them clean up if there’s something on their credit report that shouldn’t be there.
What would you say are your main duties?
The way that we bring our services to market is through strategic partnerships. A lot of my time is really understanding the channels that we’re in, and what’s going on in the marketplace that could affect our partners’ customers.
We put the right messages out there. Some of it is pushing content out through our service, and some of it is writing.
Financial institutions are one of our largest markets, so services like EZShield are a way to increase their retention and use that same content as their own to enhance their relationship with the customer.
What is the biggest key to a company or individual being prepared for a cyber attack or breach? Is there one particular tip you are giving out a lot?
A lot of it is basic education.
The reality is that most of the tips are really the same.
We have a website called FightingIdentityCrimes.com, that’s where we push all of our content for consumers and small business. Our mission is to help people understand what it means.
So, take for example, Equifax exposes the information for half the U.S. population, so helping people understand the difference between their payment information being exposed versus their social security number being exposed and how much more impactful it is.
If it was your credit card, you can cancel and replace that. There’s a perception that it’s just about their payment information, when in reality their identity information could create far more financial damage.
