October marks the month of an international cybersecurity awareness campaign dedicated to the general public. But here, let’s instead focus on companies, where the risk of an attack is so much higher. Based on a survey conducted by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), it was concluded that 43% of companies had not hired a cybersecurity professional. Let’s take a look at the risks involved if you don’t have effective IT security mechanisms for your business.
1- Threats to your IT security
Without a well-defined cybersecurity strategy, a cyber-attack could have serious consequences for your business. Attacks translate in different ways:- Embezzlement: where an employee or someone outside the organization dishonestly debits its accounts.
- Computer viruses: their introduction (allowed because of a non-existent or faulty security system) can lead to the complete or partial destruction of company files. Thus, months or years of work may be irrecoverable. Some of the files most frequently exposed to viruses include Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, backups, and executable files with an EXE extension.
- Hacking of sensitive data such as trade secrets, industrial property rights and personal data.
- The removal of important documents to be held for ransom, or delivered to the competition.
- Distributed denial of service attacks: a corporate website is inundated with unnecessary information from a network of computers, which leads to a crash and makes the system non-functional.
- Phishing or hijacking: a person or entity tries to collect confidential data by fraudulently appearing to be trustworthy. Phishing is carried out by e-mail, and the deviation is done by means of fictitious sites or servers.
2- The consequences of a cyber-attack for your business
A company that has been the victim of a cyber-attack suffers long-term consequences, on several levels:- Financial damage: in addition to the immediate cost of extortion and ransoms paid to cybercriminals, computer attacks weaken the turnover of affected companies, as well as their market valuation.
- Degradation of reputation and brand image: how can you remain credible to your partners, shareholders or clients when you have confidential data stolen?
- Business downtime: a computer attack forces an organization’s core business activity to be put on hold while any potential risk is eliminated.
- Lack of customer confidence in the security of the business: customers will be more inclined to engage with another business, resulting in lower profit and sales.
