When it comes to moving forward as a company, the question of cybersecurity is of utmost importance if your company has any presence on the Internet.
The internet can be a very malicious place for your business. Big-time corporations across many industries are frequently targeted by hackers. These hackers try to get lucky with anything from corporate emails to logins. One way to prevent all that is with cybersecurity.
What Is Cybersecurity And Why Is It Important?
The best way to protect anything online is with cybersecurity. This goes anything from protecting private and sensitive information to full-proof system break-ins.
Cybersecurity can easily be explained as a service, much like normal security, but for your digital assets. The people that provide this service can be an in-house IT team or outsourced. As a matter of fact, a lot of services out there provide top-notch cybersecurity.
But why is it so important? Well, seeing as our digital assets are more important than ever, having the ability to protect them from malicious attacks should be our top priority as business owners.
As we mentioned, hackers aren’t really selective with their prey; they just initiate the attack and hope to catch something. Furthermore, literary every business owner has personal and sensitive information that should not be made public, nor have someone else obtain them. This goes anything from company records, private data, social security numbers, etc.
Truthfully speaking, as much as 50% of all businesses fail to recover after experiencing a hacker breach in their system. This is why cybersecurity is important, and why you should definitely employ for your business. You can find more information on Keller Lenkner DataBreach.
Cybersecurity Threats Faced By Businesses
As we mentioned yet again, hackers don’t really choose their prey. The unlucky entity could be a business, a person, and even a country. According to Embroker, the cybersecurity threats that businesses mostly deal with are ransomware attacks and intellectual property theft.
These attacks can be targeted to obtain anything from upcoming product blueprints and designs, personal company information, future business plans, and anything else that you might associate a business with.
And yet another unfortunate thing is that these hackers don’t have a preference of size. This means that hackers don’t really care if your business is small, medium, or huge. Truthfully speaking, the smaller your business is the easier for hackers to breach your systems and emails. You can even debate that smaller businesses have a hard time recovering from such attacks, even if nothing of greater value is stolen.
In the case of medium to large businesses, the most daunting headache is the fact that a hacker is into your system through compromised employee accounts, and you have no idea about it.
Unfortunately, though, there is no way to really prevent or prepare for such events if you aren’t familiar with the issue. Those that are familiar, on the other hand, stand a chance against mitigating these threats.
According to Blueclone Networks and expert Milan Baria, businesses that rely on connectivity are the ones that stand the least amount of chance against such events. Since lots of companies are connected through a lot of external services such as their website, VPN, and various other connection systems, taking the necessary precautions to familiarize yourself with this service gives you the best chance of survival.
If we take into consideration the fact that as much as 50% of all companies fail to recover after a ransomware attack, familiarizing sooner than later is your best option.
Let’s give you an example of how devastating the lack of cybersecurity can be. In 2013, a hacker attack called “The Target” targeted Target’s systems (we know, sorry) and managed to obtain 70 million customer records and much as 40 million payment card accounts!
This attack is one of the most notorious up to date. The hackers managed to get in Target’s systems by stealing third-party credentials. The hackers then exposed Target’s lack of security and managed to install malware that copied the entire employee and customer databases.
But that’s not all of it. In 2014, North Korea, the country, was accused of hacking Sony Pictures. They managed to hack Sony and wanted to remove a movie that Sony was making. The movie, conveniently enough, was a satirical flick that revolved around the assassination of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.
So, you can see here that not all hacker attacks are about money. Some are about political gain and some about notoriety and others for making a name for yourself.
Why Are Business Most Targeted?
Companies and businesses are the most likely candidate for a hacker attack. While not all hacks are tied to financial gain, most are.
But what happens when a company is breached and data is stolen? Well, to make matters worse for the victim, any data obtained from a hacker attack is then sold on the Dark Web for profit.
As you all know, and for those that don’t, the Dark Web is shady and mysterious places where you can literary do anything. The Dark Web isn’t indexed by Google or any other browser, and can only be accessed through a select few browsers such as Tor.
We won’t get into what exactly the Dark Web is, but think of it as the bottom layers of the internet; the ones that no one wants to hang out to nor even know that exist.
So, one reason is for financial gain. Naturally, this means that the businesses most likely for a target are financial institutions, banks, loan associations, credit unions, and every other business or company that deals with money. A frequent, and quite easy, target for hackers is eCommerce websites and anything of the sort.
Now that you’ve gotten quite familiar with the basics of cybersecurity, will you make an effort to protect your company? If this wasn’t enough to convince you on the matter, we really advise against waiting for the moment to come to react.
The best way to beat a hacker in his game is to think one step ahead, not be reactive.
