Your Secrets Are Not Safe; The Sad Truth About Online Security
If you use social media, chances are good that you’re going to be a victim of a security breach.
It may not be on the grand scale of the ones that make the news, but it’s going on all the time. Information technology services report that over 600,000 Facebook accounts are compromised in some way every day of the week, and cyber threats have been a fact of life for 10% of all social media users.
Anyone who banks online – and that includes some 61% of us – is exposing sensitive personal information to criminals in nearly 200 countries. Smartphones and mobile tablets appear to be even more at risk, with some 145,000 new malicious programs detected in 2013 alone. With good reason, one in three people surveyed in that same year said they would never conduct financial transactions using one of those devices, citing security concerns as the reason.
Most virus protection is useless against the constantly evolving malware being deployed to steal your secrets.
It’s bad enough that we as individuals have to be on guard to protect our resources, but for businesses it’s even more of a problem. They have to defend not only their own data but that of their customers as well. Information technology services in one form or another have to become a vital part of any company’s strategic planning, whether it’s extranet risk analysis, intelligent storage systems design or simply more robust and informed IT management. Gone are the days when information technology services consisted primarily of diagnostics and repair.
But with some 47% of small businesses reporting that they don’t even perform the basic and crucial task of backing up their data, we still have a long way to go in terms of understanding the grave risks we’re facing.
