Are You Risking Your Company’s Reputation?
The Impact Of A Data Breach To Your Company
The potential of a business encountering a data breach is higher than ever before. Security threats are intensifying and rapidly evolving daily, causing data breaches to increase in frequency. There have been some recent massive incidents involving large corporations including Target, Neiman Marcus and Jimmy Johns.
It may be easy to assume that a small business is not at risk; however, small businesses are generally more vulnerable than large companies.
In the Target Corporation breach, according to Krebs on Security, the hacker’s initial target was for a heating and air conditioning company, Fazio Mechanical. Fazio fell victim to an email phishing scam. Access to Fazio’s system network was gained through a malware-laced email. Since Fazio’s was a heating and air conditioning contractor for Target, they held network access for project and billing purposes. The hacker used Fazio’s as an entrance to upload and infect Target’s point-of-sales systems with malicious software. Target’s failed response to warnings allowed for more than 110 million consumers credit card and personal data to be accessed.
Small Businesses Are Also At Risk
Since many small businesses do not generally follow the best security practices, nor have the funds to support expenses for high protective measures, cyber criminals are using them to intrude into larger company networks. A breach like this can be damaging to a business’s reputation, trust and finances along with causing legal implications.
Security operations and practices should become a top priority for any size business to reduce the risk of a data breach.
You can easily do some preventative measures on your own:
- Keep your operating systems, software, hardware and apps all up-to-date.
- Make sure to use an anti-spam software and keep it up-to-date.
- Use strong passwords that are different for each of your accounts.
Things you can do with the support of Netsonic:
- You are as good as the company you keep. If you have, sensitive materials on your server have us look into moving you into our dedicated cloud server environment.
- Gain peace-of-mind with a fully monitored and managed backup solution by Netsonic.
- If you have an e-commerce site, secure data flow with a SSL certificate.
