If you’re a business owner, you really have your hands full, every day, with the minutiae of running your business, balancing your books, orders, employees, scheduling, inventory, servicing customers, payroll, taxes…you name it!
But, did you notice something missing from that abbreviated list of what consumes your time?
Security.
Security was missing from that list.
You might read that and think your office and systems are secure. Frequently, it’s not in the day-to-day operation of your business, which is why we have statistics like this:
In the first 6 months of 2019, alone, over 3,800 data breaches were reported, with over 4 billion records being exposed as a result. If you broke it down evenly, that would be over 20 million records stolen every single day this year.
Unfortunately, these stolen records can contain crucial information about ourselves, with the most prevalent being an email address, password combination, and/or user credentials. When bad actors get ahold of these credential lists, they usually start a process known as “credential stuffing,” meaning they try to use these stolen credentials at pretty much every financial and social site available on the internet. You can pretty much be assured that some username and password combination you have used on the Internet is on a list somewhere, being used as I type this.
More bad news. Approximately 40% (conservatively) of all breaches targeted small to medium businesses (SMBs). I’ll stop there, as I could fill this article with examples, but I’m sure you get the point: data is a target, whether you want it to be or not.
