If you have been watching the news lately, then you undoubtedly know about the importance of cybersecurity and the recent data breaches inflicted on everyone from small websites to large corporations in every vertical. Everyone from healthcare providers to retail stores to credit card companies are experiencing the brunt of hackers as they try to – and succeed at – stealing customer information. In fact, 43% of companies reported data breaches in the past year.
As you read this blog, you might wonder if cybersecurity is something that affects you. After all, if hackers are attacking the brand names, why would they go after the smaller sites, right? Wrong. It turns out that sites built on popular blogging platforms can be penetrated – 162,000 sites were hijacked just last year.
Let’s explore three reasons why you should seriously consider cybersecurity for your website:
1. A Security Breach is Expensive
Hacking a website alone is inexpensive for both parties, but the repercussions from a hacked website are immense. Cybersecurity crimes cost the economy $575 billion dollars, with the United States leading at $100 billion. For everyone from small businesses to multi-national corporations, a well-planned hack means having to purchase new security software, hire new developers, as well as resources tied up, ensuring customers that they don’t need to worry about new site holes after old ones have been patched up.
2. Loss of Personal Information
For larger websites that include e-commerce, this also means the stealing of customer information. With roughly half of American adults experiencing exposure of personal information to hackers in the past year, building a website that users can trust is good for business and good for people.
3. Maintaining User Experience
Content experience is important for any website. Users want to visit and know that the content they read is trustworthy and that they are part of a community of like-minded users. A site swimming in spam and phishing links does not accomplish that. Phishing is big business too, with 31% of links aimed at financial fraud and many aimed at manipulating bank and retail websites.
So what’s next?
How do you protect yourself and your website against cybersecurity threats? We believe that protection is part common sense and part using the best applications available on the web. When building your website and using the web:
- Don’t click on links from just anyone or anywhere. Make sure the source is verifiable and trusted. The same goes for downloading content.
- Secure your website where you can. Integrating technologies like SSL gives your visitors peace of mind. Other tools such as Stop the Hacker on myhosting.com provide website security and automated scans so you are always in the know in case you have malware. Sometimes security is also as easy as updating to the latest version of whatever content management system you’re using.
- And in case you do get hacked, plan ahead by backing up your data. With so many opportunities to get phished or hacked, sometimes the worst just happens. Ease any potential pain by investing in a data backup plan as necessary, whether you’re storing important files in the cloud or locally on an external hard drive.
In closing, cybersecurity is one of the biggest issues today, threatening hundreds of thousands of websites and costing companies an immense amount of revenue. However, with the right steps, website owners can adequately protect themselves against the next breach and continue to provide visitors with great content and a great overall experience.
