Now that you’re back in the swing of things as fall rounds the corner, you are probably starting to get back into old routines. Kids are back in school and work is heating up again after summer vacation and the last Labor Day beach or pool parties are now past.
But now that fall is rounding its head with cooler weather and the reality that lazy days of summer are past, you might want to rethink a couple of things specifically when it comes to keeping your identity safe online.
Today, a very real and present danger is giving away enough information where scammers will steal not only your identity but also drain your bank accounts. I want to walk through a few easy habits to get yourself into so that you ensure your accounts are safe and sound and your identity is far out of reach of prying criminal minds.
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This summer you might have noticed a couple of new targets for cyberattacks.
Along with various town governments and hospitals, school districts have become a prime target for criminals. Schools handle a TON of personal data and often lack strong technology teams to keep their students’ data security. All of this leads to open targets for cyberattacks—something many cybersecurity experts are afraid of.
To help relieve some of the angst with back to school, I wanted to make sure you were considering some cybersecurity basics for your kids—whether they’re just starting out or nearing graduation this year. Practicing good cyber safety at an early age will help them keep their information secure through adulthood.
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With so many data breaches and cyberattacks to-date this year, damages resulting from those attacks are skyrocketing to unforeseen amounts. In the past few weeks alone, there have been a wide array of attacks wreaking havoc on organizations large and small, impacting over 100 million individuals in one of these instances.
Will investing in more security technology solve the problem?
Probably since I’m asking this question, you’re already thinking ‘no!’. What we have seen is that there are actually a lot of organizations investing in quite a bit of IT security products and services. The question not being asked is whether that money is being invested in the right places.
With tightening budgets elsewhere in your organization, I’m sure that investing additional money in security technology is something that you and your leadership are not entirely sold on. Much of the time there is no visible return on this investment and it’s hard to tell whether your spending money on the right tools to keep your organization secure long term.
Rather than ask if investing in technology will help solve our collective security problems now and in the future, is to ask am I spending money on security in the right places within the organization.
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Way back 5 years ago, a company whose business was to store code in the cloud simply vanished. Nearly in the blink of an eye Code Spaces went out of business. The culprit? Its confidence that the cloud was a golden bullet in storing data.
Code Spaces was a company that offered to development teams (I mean programmers here) code repositories and project management tools. It had been thriving for over 7 years, with no shortage of folks interested in its services.
But that all ended when its cloud storage was attacked.
I know you already know at least the basics of security. We all talk about security and backups—especially in the cloud—but wat we don’t understand is: how are we protecting our data in the cloud?
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Over the past few years there has been no shortage of news of a data breach or vulnerability. Each had major financial and reputation-related consequences. Each with its own way in.
It might seem impossible. As organization leaders or board members, how can you make sure your organization can escape the barrage of headlines bombarding the news? Who can you trust and what advice will be critical to avoid a devastating mistake?
One thing is clear: what most organizations have been doing is not good enough anymore. Attacks and breaches keep occurring. Cybercriminals are defining clear targets—as if they had better marketing strategies defining clearly each of their targets. They know your vulnerabilities and have vectors to break through those weaknesses.
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You say you have an archive of your data, that’s all you need. I’d say not quite. Data archives and backups are different—as in they are meant for different things.
In today’s world where we are confronting more natural disasters, more cyberattacks and greater risks to your business continuity. I want to make sure you are well-informed on the nuanced differences between data backups and archives so that you are certain your organization has the tools it needs to recover quickly.
First, what is a backup?
You can think of a backup as a copy of data that you can use to restore that data in case of loss or damage. The original data will not be deleted after a backup is made (in fact, you may have backups every single day or hour in a day, depending on how sensitive your organization is to data continuity).
Many organizations will retain backups for a certain amount of time (commonly a data retention policy spans a month or two).
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