The coronavirus isn’t the only threat in our midst nowadays. With so much of the world in quarantine and so many employees working remotely, nefarious forces have amped up their attempts to infiltrate our data and get us on the phishing hook as online activity has increased.
In fact, according to a May 2020 newsletter distributed by iThemes Security, web performance and security company Cloudflare has reported that hacking and phishing attempts are up a whopping 37% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some days calling for blocking between four and six times the number of attacks normally seen prior to the outbreak.
What does this mean to the average small business trying to stay afloat in these uncharted waters?
- Hacking means that if and when cyber criminals get ahold of usernames or passwords, identities can be faked, user data can be sold and exploited, company reputations can be ruined.
- It means that stored histories on computers can create a trail of ever-growing information about clients or employees that lead to LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media profiles to target them with phony processes or instructions meant, at best, to expose and invade, and, at worst, to defraud and victimize.
- It means that an informed and targeted digital assault can be made on a whole company or organization, almost always for some kind of monetary gain.
- Always more sophisticated phishing techniques mean that counterfeit messages that take advantage of the human psyche are sent in a concerted effort to get an individual or group to make some kind of move that will lead to falling prey to a malevolent scheme.
- It means havoc can be wreaked on IT systems, malware can overtake company operations, and the skyrocketing costs to address cyber assaults can stretch already-stretched-too-thin budgets to a breaking point.
But there are steps that can be taken to secure and protect your site, checks that can be made to determine your vulnerability, and measures that can be put in place to block malicious attempts to gain entry to your private information. One such tactic is having all the data that’s targeted for your website first go through a scanning process to ensure its safety before it ever reaches your website. In this way, not only is one site protected from being compromised, but cross-contamination to other sites is prevented as well.
Now more than ever, you need to be vigilant about your online security—for your customers, your team members, your network, and yourself—and that’s why RWS Consulting implements this scanning process on all the sites we manage, along with a host of other strategies that help our customers stay up-to-date and as armed as possible against mounting attacks on website fidelity.
Call us today for a “health checkup” of your web security, since prevention before the fact is always better than a costly and time-intensive remedy afterward.
RWS Consulting: 202-409-8113 or info@rws-cc.com