Summary: It is critical to the health of your business that you take hacking and extortion as a serious potential risk. Protect your customers, and your business, by securing customer data, minimizing data collection, and educating your staff.
Hacking is a big business now. With a record number of breaches this year, corporate data theft and extortion are at an all-time high. The only way to protect the data and privacy of your customers and users is to ensure that you have robust security policies in place.
Applications
The first step is to secure your applications and data. Whether that data is on your file server, in-transit, or on a server at your data center, take measures to secure that data. All applications should follow an application security policy that outlines who has access to that information and how it is stored.
Collection
Organizations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Uber make a living out of storing and processing as much data as possible. However, for smaller businesses, it is a good practice to store as little data about your customers as possible. Hackers cannot steal data that you do not have. If it information is not critical to the product or service, you provide do not ask or store it. Alternatively, you could follow Apple’s policy and anonymize and stored data.
Education
Take steps to regularly educate your users on the importance of data security and the implications of a breach. You can also look at possible actions that can be taken in the event of willful negligence.
The security of your users and customer’s data is only as strong as the weakest link. Take every precaution possible to protect yourself and your customers.
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