How To Keep Your Online Business Secure - Classy Career Girl

How To Keep Your Online Business Secure The news that Yahoo is amongst the list of big organizations that have been hacked could hardly be scarier. After all, if Yahoo is vulnerable, then so is just about every other site you could think of: TalkTalk, Carphone Warehouse, Sony, LinkedIn â€" you name it, no one is safe. This visualization at information is beautiful  shows the worlds biggest data breaches and gives us an easily digestible overview of just how destructive and widespread cyber hacks have become. You might think that it’s just those big headline-making hacks that we dont have to worry about, but the truth is that the internet is a much more frightening place than most of us  are even aware of. How to Keep Your Online Business Secure Small Business in The Spotlight Back in February, the British government’s Security Breaches Survey found that as many as 74% of small businesses in the UK had reported some form of a security breach in the previous twelve months. The attention-grabbing message was that smaller firms people like us are increasingly in the criminals’ sights. The scarier, read-between-the-lines message is that you need to be very careful indeed wherever and whenever you’re online. As The Guardian reported, all it takes is a careless click to open a single, innocent-looking email. Career Crunch Needless to say, if you’re running your own business any serious breach can be enough to put you out of business. But if you’re the staff member of a larger organization who somehow manages to let the bad guys in and it doesn’t always have to be by email you can just as easily find your career is suddenly unplugged. [RELATED: 5 Things You Need To Launch Your Own Business] The Safety Net The good news is that even though there are all sorts of bad guys out there, plotting to steal your data, your cash and even your identity, there is an ever-growing army of specialists dedicating themselves to the task of making the web a safer and more secure place. This is great news for those of us running an online business. Sorry to get technical, but the sneaky web-scraping bots that criminals set in motion to dig their way into your files like poisonous ants are very much in the sights of the security industry. They even talk in terms of headless browser bots, which sounds incredibly nasty apparently, these are especially good at mimicking the behavior of human users and so are all the more likely to sneak through conventional automated defenses. But not all of them. Doing Nothing is Not an Option Whatever your budget and whatever you use the web for, whether your web app or your brochure website, the more you can afford to sensibly invest in internet security, the safer you will be. And the more you can practice good habits (like updating your passwords regularly!) and the more you can familiarize yourself with the different threats out there, the less likely you will be to fall victim to an attack. A headless web-scraping bot may sound horrendous, but there is no reason why those nightmares should keep you awake at night. Just don’t make it easy for them.