When you hear about ‘hackers’, you’re probably thinking of Anonymous or some other black-hat hacking group. You’re also assuming that your company couldn’t possibly be a target. You’re quite right actually, since those popular hacker groups are aiming at much larger companies than smaller ones. However, you still could be a target to a hacker.
While most of you are concerned about outside hackers and hacking attacks, you misplace the idea of an inside job. According to new research from Forrester, only 25% of data breach cases are the work of external attackers. That means that 75% are coming from inside the company. Of these ‘inside jobs’, 12% were breached with ill intent according to Forrester and 63% were caused by something more mundane, like losing or misplacing corporate assets.
Knowing this, it gets quite clear that backing up your data and keeping secret data a secret is the most critical part of securing your system and information. If a breach happens and files get lost, deleted or stolen, you’ll have a backup. Most of you don’t think about the importance of your data until a disaster happens, right? In most cases, setting up a backup solution then is too late. Backing up data these days is pretty simple and affordable. There are a number of services such as Datahouse, Mozy and Carbonite that provide backup services for your entire system. And if you’re not sure what you need to know about backups or what to look for, we’ve written plenty of articles you can review to help.
Encrypting your data offers another layer of protection to your information. A personal encryption application like TrueCrypt, will allow you to do this, as will encryption software, like that from Symantec.
As a small business owner you need to ensure your data is safe from all threats; inside and out. While there is still no fail-safe way to ensure you won’t be hacked, by taking a few simple steps you can rest a bit easier knowing you are somewhat protected.
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