I was reading an article on cybersecurity the other day that had argued that cybercrime is inevitable.
Whatever you did, someone is bound to find a way in. The article briefly mentioned an attack that compromised nearly 773 MILLION email accounts and credentials and was underscoring a theme that has grown far too common among cybersecurity professionals: there is no hope.
I want to be clear here: I am NOT one of those professionals. There is certainly more than just hope when it comes to protecting your business or your personal information.
While this article suggested we not digitize everything and revert back to paper, what it misses is that most people do not follow through on very simple techniques to keep data secure.
Going back to paper might be one way to ensure a hacker not get to your information, but as those file cabinets overflow with printed numbers, letters and characters, how long will you tolerate not being able to find a single document of the thousands stuffed within your files.
The hard truth is that in 2019, we need secure digital data to keep sane.
Our businesses demand data and we need to not be thinking about how to make data printable, but rather how we can identify risks and make sure it is best secured with the resources we have on hand (most organizations don’t think about this and that’s where they get into trouble).
About a month ago there was a huge cyberattack that did expose 773 million emails and passwords. And while there is no guarantee that once you make sensitive information digital it will be safe, there’s no way assuring anything is a hundred percent safe.
Even if you lock your documents in flood-proof safes, when a flood comes, you might have a soggy mess of unreadable paper. I’ve seen this with my own two eyes. Nothing is 100% guaranteed.
While certain cybersecurity folks may take the pessimistic approach that data will inevitably be hacked, I’d err towards data that isn’t well-managed or taken care of is probably going to fall into the bucket of not being safe.
Some of these experts—some of which were mentioned in that article that I read—suggest that the cure to cybersecurity is to simply slow down. What they mean here is to be more purposeful in what we digitize. What we are willing to risk being exposed. They mean to say that we need to step back and figure out what is just too valuable to ever put into digital formats because there simply is too much at stake.
But I’d argue with them that the more we slow down to reassess and evaluate new technologies, to be cautious about not transforming data into digital copies, the more we are putting ourselves and our businesses at risk.
There is a certain merit in slowing down. We don’t want to act without any evaluation, but as we all know there is no good snail’s pace in business that is going to keep us safe from competition and the market. I consider cybercrime as a form of competition. These criminals are chiseling away at what we value and they’re finding any way possible to exploit that value.
If we take years to realize basic decisions about how to approach data and data security, we’ll either be hit by another angle or out of the market completely out of indecisiveness.
There have been countless points in history where humanity has adopted new technology. Electricity, running water, motorized vehicles, the internet.
The only way to survive is to evaluate all of our angles, decide what eliminates the most risk and follow through. Not acting or not using our data sets us back.
What we need is forward thinking, testing and approaches to make sure we’re securing data without carrying around huge amounts of risk.
How to avoid risk? If you’re a Dynamic Edge client, talk to your BTM about standards and whether you are sticking to standards that are keeping your organization safe.
If you’re not a client, consider evaluating your risks through a network security assessment to see how and where to invest in security to make the biggest impact.
