Oh, my gosh, it’s getting worse.  You know, the fragility of your data.  Or if you don’t know, you need to.  We at CrafTech want you to understand this situation, which can harm you as a private person as well as a workplace administrator.  Technology has given us a whole new range of options, whether for shopping, data storage or communications.  More and more people have become comfortable with incorporating them unthinkingly into their lives.  And when are we likely to do the most with the fewest precautions, both on the job and in our personal lives?  Around the holidays, when the volume of almost everything is turned up and so is the pressure.  It’s important that you review your precautions and your liabilities now, because the holidays are a most distressing time for you or your company to suffer a data breach.

When it comes to hacking, the key to understanding your situation is knowing what the hackers are after.  The most widely understood reason is obtaining money through identity theft, either directly via accessing banking or credit card information, or indirectly, by obtaining email addresses and passwords that with a little effort unlock the accounts of most of us.  Hacker attacks in 2019 span industries from banking’s Capital One to auto giant Toyota, dining providers Door Dash and Dunkin’ Donuts, healthcare’s Quest Diagnostics and the graphic design website Canva –to the tune of more than 250 million individuals potentially affected.  Those are just the big names, though.  The canny hacker seeks smaller targets to make a killing.  Are you one?

A technique that is possibly even more widespread is data ransoming, where a hacker gains access to vital information, encrypts it or otherwise makes it inaccessible and then demands huge amounts to release it.  Targets this year varied from shipping giant Pitney Bowes to the Philadelphia judicial system (one of 140 documented attacks on public state and local governments and health care providers this year alone) to suburban school districts.  Victims are discouraged from paying ransom for obvious reasons, but no one really knows how effective or widespread the attacks are.  And smaller victims are more likely to succumb to ransom demands.  The huge upsurge in ransomware attacks over the last couple of years indicates that the technique must be exceedingly and frighteningly lucrative.  Just how safe are you?

A more devious motive for hacking than direct gain, and one that has received less public attention, is the theft of costly infrastructure, servers and storage arrays.  This is mostly effected via malware, often present in bundled software applications.  You might never know that your architecture is host to a horde of malbots that a hacker uses for identity theft, ransom, or just malicious intent—unless you have CrafTech on your side!

Where are you vulnerable to hackers?  If you’re not sure, know that CrafTech can answer the question for you, and provide security for your systems when you most need it.  If you see yourself as vulnerable to hacking, we are there to make you safe.  And not just from hacking.  Our Unified Threat Management will protect you from any of the ills besides data breach that plague technology:  insecure application user interface, cloud storage abuse, loss of data, insider threat, the weak points created by the Internet of Things, the potential liability of shadow IT.

So this holiday give yourself the best present you can—peace of mind.  CrafTech is happy to make sure this the merriest season of all for you!

Written by: Susan Palmer