Last week I was discussing cybersecurity with industry expert Bharat Bhise HNA, a man who has spent over 15 years in this industry and someone who works on behalf of a number of security companies in developing software. Bharat stunned me when I told me about the small percentage of business owners who have invested in cybersecurity, and the number of owners who have no protection at all. When we got to talking about why these owners didn’t deem it necessary to install this important software, the reasons we considered were that it cost too much or that they just didn’t understand the dangers. To take that latter point, it is essential that you as a business owner understand the dangers of a cyberattack and the damage which it can cause to your company, let’s take a look.
Operation Shutdown
Cyberattacks can last for hours or even days and during the hack and shortly afterwards your entire IT infrastructure is going to be take offline. This means that your business will be unable to make sales process payments, do online banking and your website will be down for the duration. You will be losing money for every hour that passes, both in lost sales and in wasted wages.
Repairs
To stop the hack and to repair your systems afterwards you can expect to pay a hefty bill to the specialists, and then you will have to pay for the security software anyway which you hadn’t done previously. Hackers can leave all manner of viruses and backdoors in your system which is why you’’ll need to bring in the experts to remedy this.
Stolen Information
Getting back online is only half the battle as you will have no idea what further attack the damage has caused. For example if you store important and sensitive business information on your systems then you may not know if that has been stolen and is on its way to a competitor. Whatever sensitive business information was on your systems, it may very well be in the wrong hands.
Staff and Customers
A large number of businesses store a plethora of sensitive personal information about their staff and their customers on the computer systems and if these have been obtained for nefarious purposes then you really are in trouble. This is generally how identity fraud is committed, following a hack the attacker will have obtained names, addresses, social security numbers and perhaps even bank details. The risk here isn’t just that the identity of your staff and your customers may be used, but it will also cause heavy damage to the reputation of your business. How many new customers can you expect to secure once the word gets out that you didn’t sufficiently protect their information?
The only way in which you can reduce the risk of this happening is by ensuring to invest in high quality and up to date security software for your business.
