Posts Tagged ‘Website Protection’

Hackers Steal Time & Revenue from SMBs Everyday – Keep it From Happening to Yours

by FireHost Evangelist on April 6th, 2010

Imagine waking up tomorrow and having your water cut off. It would be annoying to deal with, but not devastating. Life goes on. But what if you didn’t have electricity? Definitely inconvenient. You can’t turn on a lamp or watch TV, but at least your iPhone works. You could still access the information superhighway, so all is well.

Now envision how you would feel if you woke up one morning and your website wasn’t working at all.  It doesn’t load or the homepage has been replaced with an offensive message — or even a warning from Google that this site is no longer secure. That’s right, you’ve been hacked and your website has been kicked off Google.

Think this can’t happen to you? It’s actually not uncommon.  It happens to small businesses every day when their website gets attacked one too many times for Google’s liking. Mberry, a small business based in Tempe, Arizona, is one of those businesses. This innovative company that sells the very cool, very fun “mberry” tablets that make everything you eat taste oh so sweet for 30 minutes.  Mberry had a rather sour experience when their site was banned from Google.

Mberry’s saga started about a year ago when their site was hacked – not once, not twice, but three times in two months. They rely on their site as a main portal for their revenues.  Having their site down multiple times going through the process of getting it cleaned up and back online was costly, annoying and damaging to their brand. But it wasn’t until they got the boot from big daddy Google, that things really got much worse.

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Top 10 Ways Hackers Obtain Confidential Data

by FireHost Evangelist on August 18th, 2009

top10Two and a half years after retail giant TJX Companies, Inc (parent company to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Home Goods) experienced one of the largest data breaches in history, the firm is still paying. This time, the settlement provides $9.7MM across 41 states to help protect consumers from payment card negligence. One quarter of those funds are devoted to creating a national fund that will investigate future data breaches.

In reality, the latest sum TJX has to pay is small potatoes compared to the capital outlay the retailer has made since 2007 to mitigate the security breach that exposed 45 million credit and debit card numbers. When the leak was discovered, TJX set aside $107MM to deal with the fallout and the expenditures to date are in that range. In two of the largest settlements, they’ve paid $24MM to MasterCard and $41MM to Visa banks. In addition, TJX has been ordered to undergo costly external audits every other year for 20 years by the FTC.

Is it 100% possible for companies to avoid costly and negative public facing situations such as this?

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US Ranks #1 in Cybercrime Activity Globally

by FireHost Evangelist on July 10th, 2009

usCrimeA recent article in BusinessWeek.com exposed the top 20 countries from which cybercrime originates. The United States topped the list with 23% share of malicious computer activity while China and Germany sit in second and third rank respectively.

Each of the twenty hacker activity hubs named in the report was evaluated based on the following criteria:

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