Don’t let an online security incident take your business offline for good. We tell you how taking precautionary steps now can save you from future catastrophes.
In the medical field, they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that’s also the case for cybersecurity. In that vein, if you own a business or you are in charge of a corporation’s website, what are you doing right now to protect against future online attacks? Recently, the White House warned Russia is exploring attacks on critical US infrastructure, including businesses. Be Prepared for the Worst Deploying a security suite after an attack is a front-line effort to mitigate some of the damage from bad actors targeting web-based businesses. However, when it comes to online security, reactive solutions may not be enough. As PCMag’s Neil McAllister recently noted in an article about preparing for cyberattacks in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, business owners also need to have a proactive plan in place to keep their operations online and prevent data loss. Josh Koenig is the chief strategy officer for Pantheon, a web operations platform for Drupal and WordPress websites. I interviewed him recently about how businesses that maintain a website presence can better prepare to deal with the inevitability of a cyberattack. Kim Key: What are the cybersecurity threats companies are facing? Josh Koenig: Increasingly, people need to worry about phishing scams and ransomware. A smart attacker will say, « I could make your website homepage very embarrassing for you now, but if you pay me these bitcoins, I won’t have to do that. » People compromise websites and use it as a way to start compromising other websites by distributing more malware. I’ve even seen things where people will compromise a website and they’ll put in a JavaScript tag that would normally be used to load an ad for something.
