Is your organization a target for hackers? If you keep data in the cloud - either public or private - you might be coasting along with a false sense of security, even if you’re not one of the big boys.
Amidst the recent hack attacks on Sony, Lockheed Martin and various banks have been smaller, less publicized attacks on small and medium size businesses. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey Fowler and Ben Worthen took a look at a few cases in which the companies in question were no larger than your average mom & pop store or gas station chain.
City Newsstand runs magazine shops in metro-Chicago. Last year, cyber thieves put some malware on City Newsstand's cash registers and ended up taking $22,000 from the company. What Fowler and Worthen say is that this is a growing threat.
“Hackers are expanding their sights beyond multinationals to include any business that stores data in electronic form. Small companies, which are making the leap to computerized systems and digital records, have now become hackers' main target,” they write in the article.
But are you at risk? Perhaps so. In 2010, the US Secret Service and Verizon’s forensic analysis unit noted 761 data breaches. 2009 only had 141. And more than 60% of the 2010 attacks were at companies with fewer than 100 employees.
What are you doing to watch your data? Is log management part of your daily operations checklist? And how secure is your cloud and your cloud applications?
If you start to worry about these things as you read them here, take a look at the entire article. And take the time to have your IT pros ramp up their analysis and your security. Or you might be next.
What’s your weakest link?
Posted
Jul 27 2011, 10:01 AM
by
JeffCutler