The easy answer to this question is more than likely: Yes!
It seems you can’t turn on the news (or even peruse social media) these days without hearing about a website that was attacked, with perhaps millions of accounts and tons of personal data getting stolen.
Many people make the mistake of thinking they are too small or there’s just no reason for these attackers to come after them, their website, or their computer. Well… think again. Anyone can be a target and chances are, you have been attacked. You may be asking yourself “Why me?”
HERE ARE THREE COMMON FORMS OF ATTACK TO WATCH OUT FOR:
DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service
This is where the hacker breaks into your computer as well as hundreds or even thousands of others and sets up a program that will usually attack a specific computer (perhaps a bigger fish) without you even knowing your computer is doing this. The hacker can then just push a button and the target computer will be so overwhelmed with traffic that it simply shuts down. Often, they will offer to stop the attack for a high ransom price.
Phishing Attacks
Have you ever received an email with a suspicious looking link or attachment? Many times, these emails will even appear to be from someone you know. Hackers will send thousands of emails like this, with the hope that someone will click on the attachment. And as soon as they click, they’ve effectively given this hacker access to their entire computer system and everything on it (perhaps to perform a DDoS attack).
Brute Force Attack
This is where a program is written to look for any vulnerability where it can attack your system or website, even where you have password protection. The idea is simple. The program uses software that will try hundreds of thousands of possible combinations to figure out your password. The attacker will also make use of all computers they’ve previously hacked to perform simultaneous attacks from multiple locations. It becomes almost impossible to block these attacks since they’re coming from hundreds if not thousands of other computers all around the world.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Can you protect yourself from these malicious attacks?
Of course. But it takes know-how. Technology is changing literally by the minute, so protecting yourself means staying on top of all of the latest methods of cyber-attack and how to defend against them. On top of that, you don’t want to protect your information so well that legitimate users (like you!) can’t log in to your system. You also need to make sure that you’ve got backup systems in place. Staying protected is very important. But so is preparing for the unexpected.
We are here to help.
Even if most people had the time to stay on top of all of this, they still probably wouldn’t want to spend their precious free time staying one step ahead of hackers. Lucky for them (and you), that’s exactly what we do. Call us today to find out how we can not only protect you and your website, but what systems we have in place should anything get through the cracks. We always have several levels of backups in place so that we can either keep you up and running, or get you back up and running in no time should anything happen. We leave nothing to chance.