There’s a pretty frightening rhetoric floating around the security space right now. To hear the media tell it, we’re living in a time of digital war, an era in which state-sponsored hackers are targeting businesses with impunity. No one could blame you for being a little nervous about your business’s trade secrets; a little paranoid about your network security.
There’s just one problem...for all that journalists are braying about government black hats; for all that cyberespionage seems to be a growing concern in enterprise, it’s not the biggest threat facing your organization. The reality of it is that you probably aren’t going to see your business targeted by a foreign government at any time in the near future.
That isn’t to say hackers aren’t still a threat, of course. They are. they just aren’t dangerous for the reasons you might think.
“Cyber attacks are not only growing more common, they’re getting more complex,” writes Wealth Management’s Megan Leonhardt. “[But] the common theme in all of the attacks implemented so far is that the hackers were taking advantage of embarrassingly trivial security flaws. While many firms could not withstand an attack by the Chinese government, that’s not the level of sophistication in these attacks.”
“One organization was running on a Windows XP service package that had been end-of-lifed by Microsoft 10 years ago,” Palantir Technologies director of cybersecurity Melody Hildebrandt told Leonhardt. “It’s well known if you plug one of these machines into the Internet, it will be compromised within four minutes.”
In other words, the greatest threat to your organization isn’t hackers, malware, foreign governments, or even ignorant users. It’s you. If you aren’t doing your job as an administrator - if you aren’t taking action to patch bugs and security flaws - then it doesn’t matter what else you do. Eventually, your network’s probably going to end up compromised, and your business is going to be dealing with a breach.
Make no mistake. State-sponsored hackers and digital espionage are still growing, disconcerting threats. They just aren’t as bad as everyone’s making them out to be. The vast majority of data breaches to date weren’t the result of some complicated attack or genius hacker - they were the result of IT not doing its job.
Does that sound a little too blunt? It may well be. But it’s nevertheless true. If you don’t keep your own network security up to date, then you’ve no one but yourself to blame when your data is compromised.
About Jamie: Jamie Madison is the Marketing Director at Steadfast, a leading IT Data Center Service company. Steadfast specializes in highly flexible cloud environments, robust dedicated and colocation hosting, and disaster recovery.
