Last month, CVS and Walmart Canada began investigating a data breach, while the IRS realized their data breach was bigger than they had previously thought. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management is facing yet another lawsuit related to cybersecurity and privacy failings that impacted 21.5 million people.
Target, Home Depot and now even the Federal Government have been breached. The truth is, it could happen to anyone, at any time. Being a small or medium-sized business does not protect you from hackers – in fact, research shows a sharp increase in hackers and adversaries targeting small businesses in the past two years.
In addition to the data contained within your network, the computers themselves can be used by hackers to launch other attacks. While it may seem like an impossible to task to protect our networks, we can assure you it is not.
A good IT security posture can keep the hackers at bay. First, know where your assets are (so you can protect them). Second, develop and implement secure configurations for those assets. Finally, test your security, learn from the vulnerabilities and repeat the process again! There is no silver bullet for the perfect IT security. You must treat IT as you do any other business process: invest in the people, the process and the technology (in that order).
Our IT security team has performed countless assessments of companies just like yours, just your size, and the results are often surprising to management. Not only are they unaware of the vulnerabilities, but they are pleasantly surprised at just how easily we can be remediate such weaknesses.
