4 IT Security Flaws That Will Cost You Customers

Information technology (it consulting) exists for the sole purpose of bringing customers and businesses closer together. It facilitates everything from sales to customer support. It should enhance every aspect of a business.

The problem is that IT flaws can cost you customers, this it why it does not matter if you are just starting your business, you still need small business it support to prevent things from falling apart. Your customers may be exposed to identity theft, incur costs from their credit card providers, and be forced to go through unfortunate situations because they were or are one of your customers.

Let’s examine four big IT flaws that can cost your business customers.

1. Unencrypted Sensitive Data

In the world of IT, data should always be encrypted. This helps obfuscate it from prying eyes for a decent amount of time. That data should stay obfuscated until it becomes invalid.

The problem is that many companies use a weak data encryption. This makes data breaches more costly than they would be otherwise, and increases the chances that your business will be attacked in the future due to relaxed security protocols.

2. Weak Passwords

The name of your family pet is never secure enough to use as a password. Similar things can be said of passwords containing birth dates, colors, plain words and relating to personal details. Passwords derived from public details are inherently weak, which means that they’re easy to force or social engineer.

The problem is the prevalence of these passwords. Businesses allow employees to use relaxed passwords, which in turn allows for security breaches to happen.

This problem becomes even worse when a high-level employee such as the CEO uses a password like “123” or “password.”

3. Unmonitored Network Security

It should be expected that cyber criminals will try to breach your network. They will likely succeed over a large enough time frame.

The only way to prevent things like personal data breaches, which cost an average of $154 per record according to the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study by IBM, is to enforce strong intranetwork security protocols and monitoring.

Managed IT services in Ottawa or your particular area can allow for constant network monitoring. They can help alert you to intrusions, which in turn can help you reduce the cost of a breach to your customers.

Why cold and Hot wallets are vulnerable to attacks?

The Blockchain is the underlying tech layer made up of a decentralized ledger and in theory, a very secure data structure as there are a lot of distributed nodes that participate in the consensus algorithm. In order to hack the blockchain, hackers should exploit vulnerabilities in a lot of decentralized nodes, which is theoretically almost impossible. The basic security assumption of blockchain is that it is impossible to hack so many nodes to change the state of the blockchain.

-If blockchain tech is so secure, how could it be hacked?

The Achilles Heel of the technology is the centralized nature of institutional users that manage large amounts of crypto assets (money) for their clients, while the only thing that stays between the money and the hackers is the private key. The private key should be used to sign, on blockchain transactions, the same way that a manual signature could be used to sign traditional checks. Did you know that a WAF SaaS like Alert Logic’s can protect your website from hackers? Check them out. If someone steals the institutions’ private key they can create a transaction on their behalf and steal the money. Unlike bank systems – once a hacked transaction is created there is no way to reverse it – the money is literally stolen.

4. Downtime

While data breaches and other security-related issues can cost a business a large amount of money, so can server downtime. Something as simple as website maintenance can cut off the resources responsible for handling personal data and the services customers need.

Something as seemingly small as customer support being offline can mean that customers are unable to fully utilize something they acquired from you. This presents problems for them, which in turn can affect everything from their finances to their personal lives.

Keeping the Cost Down to Your Customers

By hiring an IT consultant to address the issues of IT in your business, you can make it more secure and reliable for your business and your customers. This can allow you to create a strong backbone that propels your business forward while giving peace of mind to your customers.