Avoiding Cyber Attacks?
I was quite surprised when my post about the July 2009 cyber attacks seemed to attract a bit of attention. The post contains general commentary and some basic suggestions for steps that you can take to reduce impacts from such outbreaks.
Avoiding a cyber attack is simply impossible (unless you unplug the wires…) – creating a flexible, resilient web presence that is less likely to fail during such an attack is possible. What should business owners with an Internet (web) presence be considering?
It’s really about planning and pain points (how much will it cost you to be offline/down? – $1 per hour or $20,000 per hour? more?) How much should you budget for measures to reduce your exposure to such attacks? can you buy insurance for such issues?
Hopefully, you have someone on staff to address these items (OR perhaps you need a consultant?)
- in-house – do you have adequate backups? can you restore to a known, recent, ‘good’ state of data?
- have you tested your recovery plan? (i.e. actually restored your production web from backups?)
- what levels of redundancy are provided with your Internet WEB business presence?
- is your web site backed up and/or automatically replicated?
- what levels of redundancy are provided with your Internet EMAIL business presence?
Like most consultants, my answer to broad technical and business questions will be, “It depends…” If you need some real answers that you can apply to your particular business then I would encourage additional research – an excellent web site covering security related topics is SANS.Org. Try the top 20 as a starter.
Related posts:
- Recent ‘Cyber Attacks’ We have seen a flurry of news reports regarding a...
- Social Media, Cyber Warfare & Cyber-Economics This is an interesting 2011 interview covering the connections between ...
- Blocking ssh server attacks (11/2011) During the past few days (early November, 2011) I have...
- ‘Twack’ & Ethics A recent cracking (an illegal access of computer systems and...
- It happened to Google – are you next? Well, it happened to Google (and a number of other...
