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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

Is Cyber Crime Impacting Small Businesses?

The internet is a very interesting place to say the least. When you put information out there, there’s a chance that it is going to stay there forever.

It doesn’t matter how much you try and erase it either. This can be a problem when you look at confidential information. After all, you don’t want this information being seen by everyone but at the same time, it can easily be made public.

The Global Survey

A global survey has been done by Gemalto and they have found that the exposure or even the theft of sensitive information could easily have a negative relationship between the customer and the business in question. At the same time, 95% of customers have stated that they would consider taking legal action against any parties that are involved. Two-thirds of people have stated that they would end their relationship with an organisation if they found that their confidential information was exposed, and this just goes to show how important it is to keep data safe. With all of this being said, it’s not hard for businesses to protect themselves. Look at the casino NetBet for example. When you look at them, you will soon find that they offer their customers a secure login, their site is protected by HTTPS and they have other measures in place too. All of this equates to a secure business environment.

Damage to Intellectual Property

Cybercrime and even data leaks can easily have a negative impact on a company’s competitive edge. When you look at the effects of business ideas, campaigns or even expansion plans you will soon see that these can easily be compromised and render any ideas useless if they were to fall into the wrong hands.

Crimes in History

Yahoo, an internet service reported that they had two breaches of account data. Both instances happened in 2016 and over 1 billion users were affected. The breaches are considered to be some of the biggest in cybercrime history. Some of the data that was leaked included email addresses, security questions, birthdates and even passwords. Yahoo were very much criticised because of their tardiness. They did not disclose the breaches right away and they also faced a lot of lawsuits as well.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional website that had over 6.5 million accounts stolen by criminals. The data was then posted on a public profile. Thousands of people had access to just about any information they wanted and it was all in plain text too. LinkedIn then published an official statement and they also talked everyone through how to reset their passwords too.

Usually, when information is stolen from companies, it is put on the internet and most of the time it is sold to someone on the dark web. This is serious to say the least and although cybersecurity is always going to be a problem, it’s important that businesses do everything they can to protect themselves and that they also take the right precautions.