What Is Hacking and Why Do Hackers Hack?
If you’re running a business website, then you’re probably aware of the threat of hacking. Have you, however, had the time to ask yourself “What is the purpose of hacking?”. The common answers might surprise you and might inform your security-related decisions.
What is the purpose of hacking?
There are three common answers to the question “What is the purpose of hacking?”. The first is just to make mischief. The second is to make a statement and the third is to make money. It can be useful to keep these in mind when thinking about what sort of security precautions you need. Here are some tips.
Hackers out to make mischief
Hackers out to make mischief will often use the old-school “spray and pray” approach to finding targets. This is very unsophisticated and hence attacks can usually be foiled with basic security measures - provided that you are organized enough to make sure that they happen. The sorts of measures that will deter hackers out to make mischief include the following.
Investing in a website vulnerability scanner
For modern SMBs, their website forms a key part of their business, even if it’s not used for direct sales. This means that it’s worth investing in robust protection for it. The good news is that you can get some excellent website vulnerability scanners at very economical prices.
Make sure you have a robust anti-malware product with an integrated firewall for your servers, local computers, and mobile devices.
All servers, computers, and mobile devices are potential routes of entry into your systems. Make sure that they have suitable protection. Again, you can get some excellent options at very affordable prices. If you have remote and/or mobile users, a VPN is also a good investment.
Minimizing the software you use, keeping it up-to-date, and learning how to use it effectively.
Use the minimum amount of software necessary to achieve your business aims, research it carefully, and make a point of changing as many of the default settings as you can and set permissions appropriately.
Hackers out to make a statement
While no organization is ever too small or too big to be targeted by hackers, it is probably fair to say that the likelihood of a company being targeted by sophisticated hacktivists is in direct correlation to the extent to which a company is involved, or perceived to be involved, in controversial activities.
Companies that do operate in controversial sectors may wish to get specialist advice on their IT security as well as their general security. Everybody else, i.e. most companies may wish to give their employees guidance on the safe use of social media, regardless of whether or not they are using it for work purposes.
Be aware that if a single employee gets on the wrong side of the wrong people (even unintentionally), and those people find out where they work, then it could lead to all kinds of problems, including cyberattacks. While this might sound overdramatic, it is or should be, a real concern for companies of all sizes, especially smaller ones that want to keep their security budgets as low as possible.
Hackers out to make money
Recent years have seen continual growth in financially-motivated hacking attacks. Probably the most obvious example of this is the rise and rise of ransomware attacks. The key point to understand about financially-motivated hacking attacks is that any company which has sensitive data, especially personal data, is a potential victim. That’s all companies of all sizes, so this threat needs to be taken very seriously.
In addition to taking standard security precautions, you also need to train staff thoroughly in social engineering exploits. Pay special attention to techniques that can be used over the phone as this is often a major point of vulnerability since it is so hard to monitor in real-time.
In addition to doing your best to prevent attacks, you need to work on the assumption that some hackers are going to get past your defenses. This means that your data, or at least your sensitive data, needs to be kept encrypted anywhere it is stored in any of your systems. This means production, backups, archives, test system, staging systems, literally anywhere.
You also need to make sure that your backup process is “hacker-proof” and, in particular, that it is “ransomware proof”. In this context, the key point to note is that hackers are increasingly using malware which is designed to work very slowly. The idea is that this will maximize its chances of infiltrating backup systems thus rendering them useless.
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