How do you resolve a cyberattack as quickly and completely as possible? A cyber incident response plan is designed to answer that question. The plan kicks in immediately after an attack and outlines exactly how your company will use its resources to minimize the damage and overcome the incident. In as much detail as possible, it describes who will be involved, what individuals’ roles will be, and which procedures they will need to follow.
Category: Data Breach Page 1 of 4
In a single day, websites experience, on average, nearly 60 cyberattacks. And for small businesses, successful attacks can have a lasting impact: 60% of small businesses will go out of business following a successful breach due to the costs of recovery.
In this article, we’ll talk about IT security incidents, which are events that indicate an organization’s systems or data have been compromised or that existing cybersecurity measures have failed. The key to staying afloat during an IT security incident is preparation — and effective communication is a major component in that. Knowing how to communicate transparently, both internally and externally, in the wake of an attack not only builds trust with your employees but also helps protect your reputation.
Cybersecurity threats aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, our annual security report illustrates that the number of daily website attack attempts increased by 59% between January 2018 and December 2018. This increase shows that cybercriminals are not only deploying attacks more often, but also using automation technology to do so.
The good news? These attempts appear to be getting less successful. Of the 6 million individual websites that we analyzed, only 60,000 were actually compromised following an attack attempt, indicating that website security tools are getting better at fending off attacks.
Here’s a common scenario: You receive a notification saying your small business website has been hit with a cyberattack. Suddenly, the web host has suspended your site, and you’ve been blacklisted from major search engines because your site poses a risk to visitors. Essentially, your website turns invisible.
Amid the chaos, you need to understand and fix the problem. Many small businesses rely on contracted web developers, who, in turn, rely on someone else for cybersecurity. The security provider needs to get involved immediately because the longer the problem persists, the worse the damage becomes.
What is a chatbot? Put in simple words, a chatbot is a software solution that uses machine learning to have a conversation (or chat as it is called) with another user online. You’ve likely seen these when you visit a website for a bank, or credit card company, a car sales website, or even a software business.
A few seconds after you land on the page, or sometimes upon arrival, a pop-up will appear that says something like “Hi, how can I help you?” or “Is there something you’re looking for?” If you answer the prompt, your chat with the bot will begin. Based on your responses additional prompts may be provided, or you might be redirected to a live representative for more help.
When it comes to data breaches, we tend to hear only about the “big ones” — from Target to Equifax to, most recently, Wipro. So it’s easy to see why people assume these kinds of events exclusively happen to large corporations. After all, who would want to go after the minnows when there are so many whales up for grabs?
Being lulled into this false sense of security is dangerous for small to midsize businesses. SMBs are just as likely to be hit by cyberattacks as their larger counterparts, and when cyberattacks do land, they’re less likely to bounce back. Even a cursory glance at some small business data breach statistics makes that clear: Following a cyberattack, 60% of SMBs end up going out of business. And every minute of downtime following a small business data breach costs $427.
2017 was a big year for malware, hacks, and data breaches. Voting machines proved to be easily hackable, Uber was caught paying off cybercriminals, and of course, Equifax experienced a breach that affected 140 million Americans. On the latest episode of Decoding Security, security analysts Jessica Ortega, Ramuel Gall, and producer/security analyst Topher Tebow count down the top ten cybersecurity issues of the past year.
Ecommerce sites can look forward to overstuffed stockings this holiday season. Holiday sales are expected to increase by at least 4 percent this year, for an anticipated total of $1.04 trillion – and for the first time, online spending is expected to exceed in-store sales. In fact, consumers plan to spend 51 percent of their holiday shopping budget online, compared to 42 percent in stores.
Despite these trends, a recent study by SiteLock shows that nearly one in three online shoppers do not plan to shop online at all during the holidays.
Nicknamed “Equihax,” the recent Equifax breach is one of the largest data leaks in history, affecting millions of people. There has been a lot of discussion about proper incident response, and whether Equifax is following acceptable procedures.
In the debut episode of Decoding Security, SiteLock Website Security research Analysts Jessica Ortega and Michael Veenstra go beyond the cause of the breach to discuss what consumers can do to protect themselves now. And, even more importantly, what consumers can do to protect themselves going forward.
Listen to Decoding Security Episode 101: EQUIHAX
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In a recent security report, researchers revealed an unsecured archive of US voter data collected by Deep Root Analytics, a data firm connected to the Republican National Convention (RNC). The exposed data — which included full names, addresses, and phone numbers of 198 million registered voters — was uncovered by a security researcher in an internet-accessible database with no password protection or any other security measures. The database has been secured at the time of this writing, but it remains unclear how long this data was exposed to the internet.
It may be easy to assume exposures of this nature are an inevitability. After all, a data analytics firm associated with a major political party sounds like a clear target for bad actors. However, the data was discovered by a researcher performing unrelated searches through Amazon’s S3 infrastructure for any unprotected data, not targeted attacks against Deep Root Analytics or even voter data in particular. This fact underscores a critical necessity of the Internet: prioritize the security of your data at all stages of its life cycle. Your data needs to be secure where it’s stored, during network transit, and when it’s in the hands of third parties. This data leak in particular was the result of the RNC failing to properly ensure the security of their data in the hands of a third party contractor.
