What is cyber security?

Cyber security is the art of protecting your systems from criminals who mean to do you harm, including ransomware like wannacry which we recently wrote a guide on. Cyber security also helps you keep criminals out of your private information and even more importantly your customers private information.

If you haven’t heard of cyber security, then you most likely haven’t heard of phishing, which is fine. Phishing is another word for fraudulent emails sent to you by people who are trying to gain illegal access to your computer. Once they gain access to your computer, they can steal all your data, use your machine as part of a large network of thousands of machines to do whatever they want, also referred to as a zombie network and to make the malware keep spreading they can use your contact list to send it to all your contacts from your email address.

 

If you don’t think that’s bad, it gets worse. Once inside your system, the criminals have control of your computer, not you. They could charge you thousands of dollars to potentially relinquish control of it or they could put all your information online for the world to see. Of course there are plenty of other uses for your machine and your data, but we aren’t getting into that in this article, since that would make up a good portion of a   book.

 

Why does my website need security? I don’t store anything sensitive on it.

This is a point a lot of people make and while you may not store anything on it, people do come to your website and we make sure of that if you use our SEO services, to make sure people can find you on search engines. If people come to your site and it is hacked, they will either also get infected, see your site defaced and potentially have dead bodies on it, like we’ve encountered in the past, or Google could block them from going to your site, which also hurts your rankings on their search engine.

If Google blocks them from coming to your site, then this is a major damage to your reputation. If your site is defaced, that also damages your reputation. Most people don’t know that 60 percent of cyber crime victims go out of business and 50 percent of all attacks are against small businesses.

This is what your customers will see if Google blocks them from coming to your site

 

So what can you do about this? Well, you can keep learning about cyber security by signing up for our mailing list, which sends out exclusive information only available to people on our mailing list.