Did you know your credit card is worth up to $20,000 to hackers? Your hotel loyalty account up to $1400? Your iTunes at least $20?
What does this mean?
Even your less important online accounts are worth money! And Twenty Dollars is Twenty Dollars!
Don’t for a second think your accounts are safe—whether you have a lot of money in them or not.
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It seems like every day, another company has a data breach. Thousands or tens of thousands of people’s personal data are stolen.
Phishing Scams
Social Engineering
People are using your identity and you probably haven’t the slightest clue!
So what should you do?
For the next few weeks, I want to focus on your personal data—all of the unique points that make you unique, make you targetable and that make you need to be concerned about keeping all of the important data safe— with a pealed eye on your personal data.
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While for some time, Google’s Chrome browser has blocked Adobe Flash if out of date, Google recently announced that it is taking steps to rid its browser of Adobe Flash Player entirely.
Chrome 55, which is slated for release in December, will replace Flash for HTML5, but Google will de-emphasize Flash in September when Chrome 53 is released, which means it will begin blocking the plugin.
Google says the change will improve security on its browser, reduce energy demands and give its users a better experience: faster page load times, more battery life and more device responsiveness.
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Credit card security
Hackers want your cardholder data. If you’re not careful with your credit card data you may be racking up big processing fees because of negligent handling of personal credit card information!
Here’s why PCI compliance is a must:
- Noncompliance fines—banks and credit cards levy fines ranging between five-thousand and FIVE-HUNDRED-THOUSAND dollars!
- Merchant Credit Card Account Suspension
- Loss of Reputation
- Loss of Customer Trust
All serious consequences of not protecting credit card data!
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Looking up information in another spreadsheet—the trick to VLOOKUP
As a marketer, you have to keep track of a LOT of data (whether you know it or not). Just think about the numbers of sales, leads, campaigns, headlines, emails, Adwords, and mailers you’ve had to keep on top of in the last month, let alone having everything at your fingertips ready to present at your monthly, quarterly or annual meetings. There’s probably enough data points floating in spreadsheets on your computer that could likely make a sane person go a little crazy!
And if you’re like me, you’re keeping your data in different spreadsheets.
Maybe you have a sales spreadsheet, specifically for sales—data about the types of marketing that lead to customer engagement, the products or services sold and the contact information of the decision maker that might buy more from your business.
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Why is this a problem?
Drives only last so long—if you have questions about how long a drives last, see our recent post on drive life expectancy [hyperlink to article]. And if you only switch out drives when they’re at the end of their lives, you’re risking all of that important data (likely worth WAY more than the drive itself!) on your backups to be corrupted and inaccessible.
So what should you be doing to be safe?
The general IT golden rule is always the rule of 3—to lower your risk of a karmic event, always have 3 copies of your important data. The original, a backup of the original and an archive of the backup. Each of these backups should be kept in different locations. If you’re using drives, that means a lot of realty—especially if you’re backing up a lot of data!
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