Imagine you’re a new small business owner who has just opened a small retail shop on Main Street, USA. Within this shop, you not only have all the widgets and wares you sell, but also a safe full of cash in the office, and computers containing your customers’ sensitive personal and credit card information as well. One night, after an exhausting 12-hour day, you leave the shop and head home, only to realize halfway there that you forgot to lock the door. You race back to the shop and find, to your relief, that no bad guys discovered your error, so you lock up and go home. This story has a happy ending, but it may make you think a bit more about how to make sure your business is safe without having to worry about whether you locked the door every night on the way home. Maybe you’ll invest in security gates or an alarm system, just for the added peace of mind.
If you’re willing to go the extra mile for the safety of your brick-and-mortar business, why wouldn’t you do the same for your online business, into which you’ve likely invested just as much time and expense? Each month, almost 20,000 websites experience malware attacks, with a great majority of these sites running a CMS like WordPress or Joomla — not because these platforms are inherently less safe, but because users running them tend to make assumption that, because of the built-in security features of the platform, they do not need to take extra precautions. This is a dangerous assumption for any online business.
In this week’s post, we’ll walk you through nine basic steps you can take to make sure you’re not the victim of a malware, crypto-mining, or any other type of attack that could put your business at risk.
