Reputational Damages
What’s worse than a data breach? Trying to cover it up. Companies have learnt this lesson the hard way, after clients discover the trusted company has been hacked and exposed to cybercrime. News like this travels fast on social media and soon you will be trending. With Dark Web monitoring and forensics tools, where data gets breached is easily traced back to the company and website, so you cannot hide it. When this happens, clients can no longer will rally around you.
Government Fines, Legal Fees, Lawsuits
Breach notification statutes remain one of the most active areas of the law. The courts are not in your favor if you expose client data to cybercriminals. Don’t think for a minute that this only applies to big corporations: any small business that collects customer information also has important obligations to its customers to keep their data safe and tell them if they experience a breach
Cost, After Cost, After Cost
One breach, one ransomware attack, can create hours of extra work for staff who are already maxed out when things are going well. Then there’s business interruption and downtime, backlogged work delivery for your current clients. Loss of sales. forensics costs to determine what kind of hack attack occurred, what part of the network is/was affected and what data was compromised. Emergency IT restoration costs for getting you back up, if that’s even possible. Then there are legal fees and the cost of legal counsel to help you respond to your clients. Cash flow will be significantly disrupted, budgets blown up. Cyber-attack is a very costly!!
Bank Fraud
If your bank account is accessed and funds stolen, the bank is not responsible for replacing those funds. Your assistance or just another employee could intentionally or unintentionally pave a way for hackers to access your bank details and with just one click, your back accounts are wiped clean. You will be responsible and you company will bear the brunt. Claiming ignorance is not a viable defense, nor is pointing to your IT team or outsourced IT company to blame them.
Using You As The Means To Infect Your Clients
Some hackers don’t lock your data for ransom or steal money. Often they use your server or website to spread viruses and/or compromise other PCs. If they hack your website, they can use it to relay spam, run malware or build SEO pages foe malicious purposes. Are you okay with that happening? This is why you need advanced endpoint security, spam filtering, web gateway security, network security and other cyber security items.
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