It Will Happen to Others, Not to My Company!

How can the choices we make influence our lives? It depends. There are right choices and wrong choices. Sometimes, moreover, these choices meet those of others, leading to the most varied results. Whatever the final outcome, it is not random, because it is influenced by the way we decided to act.

So a company can choose to protect its sensitive data... or not. Addressing the problem of IT security by saying “It will happen to others, not to my company!” leads down the road to imminent disaster. If a hacker decided to attack the unprotected organization, financial and reputational damage would be inevitable.

If the choice not to protect one's system meets the choice of a malicious hacker to tamper with it, the result is easy to imagine. Attackers, after all, prefer poorly protected targets that expose vulnerabilities that are easy to identify and exploit.

This was the main topic of Black Hat USA 2013, the largest and most famous cybersecurity conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tripwire conducted a survey of a sample of attendees and found that half of them expected their business to be attacked in the next six months.

According to the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, attacks exploiting vulnerabilities are the most common against organizations and caused 52% of the 621 breaches and 47,000 incidents listed in the report.

Despite data showing how imprudent it is not to protect IT systems, about 50% of respondents believe they are not at risk, remaining optimistic about the IT security of their company.

“It will happen to others, not to my company!”. A phrase that inhibits real progress in IT security and allows hackers to persist undetected in organizations, increasing the dangerous impact of breaches.

And what have you chosen? To hope you are never attacked, or to try to implement protection policies suitable for safeguarding sensitive information?

A suggestion: have your company's IT systems assessed by IT security professionals. EasyAudit will help you identify the vulnerabilities of your systems. All guaranteed by the EasyAudit Checked seal, a guarantee for your customers.