Be aware of the latest threats to your website and how to protect against them. Looking at how your technology choices can impact how vulnerable your website is, how to prevent attacks with 3rd party software and reviewing your backup strategy for when things do go wrong. What would be the cost to your business if your website was offline for a day? A week? Several weeks or more? Do not make the mistake many businesses do and think that this will not happen to you, websites are attacked and hacked near automatically these days by sophisticated botnets designed to take advantage of your weakness.
Whether you are running an ecommerce store or a basic websites, the costs involved from an attack are huge;
- How many lost enquiries per day would you lose if your website was offline?
- What would the value of those enquiries be over the lifetime of those new customers?
- What would the lost revenue look like if you are an ecommerce shop?
- What would be the cost for you to fix these problems in number of person-hours taken, and the lost revenue by not having these people work on revenue generating activities?
- What would be the reputational damage to your business if your website was hacked and customer details were stolen?
You have to ask yourself the question, can you afford not to protect your website?
Some facts about website attacks;
- 45% of data thefts are for non-payment card data
- 85% of the exploits detected were from 3rd party plugins
- Weak passwords contributed to 31% of breaches
- 96% of investigated applications had one or more serious security vulnerabilities
- 100% of mobile applications tested contained at least one vulnerability
- 71% of victims did not detect the breach their self
- The average number of days from initial intrusion to detection was a whopping 87 days
- 81% of large businesses having experienced security breaches in 2014.
- The cost of a typical breach is now at £1.15 million, up from £600,000 in the previous year.
Larger organisations generally have more security built into their website whereas smaller and medium sized businesses always think they will never be a target. The fact is that many smaller and medium sized business websites are often the targets as they are far easier to break into as they haven’t invested in security.
Michael Cropper