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Perhaps the question should really be, how long could they bring down your business for?

It’s an alarming thought, but in truth a single hacker with the right knowledge could seriously damage your business to the point that you wouldn’t be able to function in any real way for several days, perhaps even longer.

photo credit: schoschie

It’s clear that you have a responsibility to make sure your business is as safe as it possibly can be. In this sense the best stance to take is to assume that yes, a hacker could indeed bring down your whole business. Are you prepared to let that happen?

Of course not - and this is why you need to put in place adequate measures to protect yourself from attack by hackers with all kinds of motives for doing what they do.

If you still aren’t convinced it may pay you to do a little research on the consequences that hacking can bring. A famous example occurred some ten years ago to Pixar Animation. An email purporting to come from the CEO (but actually coming from the hacker who had managed to get into the system) was sent to every employee detailing exactly how much each of them got paid.

Now if this happened to your business, how would you deal with the fallout? It’s true that this kind of event does not have a direct effect on your clients, and if the hacker is just trying to prove a point and isn’t interested in having the personal information of your employees then their personal information is ’safe’ (if you can really call it that.)

But how do you think your employees would feel if they knew that confidential details about their employment had been made available to everyone else working for you? It’s clear that you would have some serious damage limitation to do, and the issue of trust that is gradually built up between a business and its employees would be blown out of the water by one single email.

Many people believe that all they need to do is ensure that their customers’ details are safe and their payment details (if the company processes transactions online) are not compromised, but the above example shows that just isn’t the case. Hackers are capable of bringing down your business in more ways than you might think; which is why getting outside help is very often a good idea.

So who should you turn to? In short, you need to focus on engaging the services of a trusted business with an excellent track record in providing internet security. This type of business has the wealth of knowledge and skills that you need to protect you against hackers of all types and descriptions, right around the clock.

There are plenty of companies around who have been built up by so called ‘ethical hackers’, who make a point of using their considerable skills to help other businesses rather than bring them down. They know exactly how to breach a system, and will try to break into yours for the purposes of plugging all the vulnerable spots they find.

There is a real market for these services now, and if you have a business yourself then you are definitely in that market.

Pure Hacking helps protect your Internet security by providing world-class penetration testing and ethical hacking risk management services. For a free consultation, please visit Penetration Testing.