Hackers Tag - Kutztown, Pennsylvania | Lantek

"I don’t need to worry about cybersecurity… my business is too small to be in the crosshairs of hackers."

Problems with cybersecurity can really sink your business. Unfortunately, more opportunists are out there today looking to profit off of business’ lack of vigilance. One example of this are large-scale scam operations that have been running in Southeast Asia, and they are now spreading to other parts of the world. These scams, called "pig butchering" scams, have caused major harm, with around $75 billion lost worldwide in 2023.

Sextortion scams are far from glamorous. These attacks involve a scammer claiming to have compromising photos or videos of their target engaged in explicit activities—often suggesting this footage was captured through their online behavior. The scammer then threatens to release this material unless a ransom is paid.

It was recently disclosed that Slim CD, a payment gateway, suffered a data breach that exposed many, many credit card accounts (nearly 1.7 million) from August 17th, 2023, until June 15th, 2024.

You’ve more likely than not purchased a ticket through Ticketmaster at some point in your lifetime, so you might be interested to find out that Live Nation Entertainment—Ticketmaster’s parent company—has had to file an 8-K with the Security and Exchange Commission to admit that 1.3 terabytes of data had been hacked. The result is that more than 560 million customers’ personal information was stolen from company servers.

Password management is always a sticking point for businesses (and even individuals), but it doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it. With the increased risk of cybersecurity attacks and advanced threats, you cannot rely on one singular password as you may have once done. Instead, you need complex passwords housed in a password manager that makes remembering your passwords significantly easier.

It’s hard to tell people that “we are under attack” all the time and actually mean it. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the more you tell people they are under threats that don’t actually affect them, the more distrust or even disdain develops for the issuer of these revelations. Second, people will never actually understand that they are under threat until something happens that proves to them that they need to be more careful. 

It's remarkable, but if you were to assess the greatest threats to your business, your users would likely rank high on that list. Human error poses a significant challenge to your security because cybercriminals exploit your employees' fallibility and proneness to mistakes.

Concerns over operational expenses, particularly regarding technology, weigh heavily on many business owners. For some, these expenses can spiral out of control, leading to financial problems in vital areas of the organization. Every business needs to ask how it can rectify its IT spending to bring on a culture of overall improvement.

One of the most dangerous types of threats is the many phishing scams you and your employees could fall victim to. While it might be tempting to poke fun at the people who succumb to seemingly obvious phishing attacks, the reality of the matter is that some phishing attacks are anything but, and they are only growing more sophisticated over time.