Hacking. How real is the threat? Very real. Just this week, one of our customer sites was the target of 22,000+ hacking attempts in 24 hours. Purposely, we have the tools in place to ward off these evil activities. Even so, the hackers are constantly upping their game causing us to spend a great deal of time ensuring the safety of our website environment. Trust me, we are not alone.
As you know, hardly a week goes by where you will read in the news or see on television that a major company or government agency has been hacked, critical data lost, and the financial impact to their customers. Don’t feel left out. We can assure you the hackers, both foreign and domestic, are knocking at your website door, too.
The motivation for hackers falls into one of two broad categories. There are those who do it just to see if they can. As the well-worn metaphor says, they climb the mountain because it is there. This was the most prevalent type of hacker in past decades. Their view of success was to break into the site, and in many cases, do no damage but left feeling satisfied. They hacked more to test their technical prowess, gain bragging rights, and street cred in their local circle of hacker friends. In today's world, such is not the case.
The motivation for the current crop of technical miscreants is financial gain or political in nature. Their goal and intention is to steal information and use it to make money - either for themselves or by selling what they stole in the internet underground. Everyone has the mistaken notion that credit card and social security numbers are the only thing worth stealing, and that getting that data is the golden goose. Moreover, bits of information like name, address, email addresses, and places of employment can be woven into make a richer, more valuable golden goose. Think identity theft.
Vigilance and preparation is key. With both of us having career backgrounds in the banking and finance industry, security was critical then, and we dare say is even more so now. C2C takes the security of our customers’ websites VERY seriously. We equip each of our customer sites with a number of best in breed and proven technologies to keep you safe. No one can claim their security methods to be guaranteed unbreakable - anyone making a 100% safe claim is selling snake oil.
We use multiple security systems layered one atop the previous. The reality is this: hackers will only put effort into a hack equal to the perceived benefit gained. Without going into eye-glazing details, any access to your website passes through the following gates, at a minimum, before reaching your website.
1. Highly-secure caches, otherwise known as Content Delivery Network
2. Highly-secure filters, at the server and content levels, otherwise known as Request Filters
Aye, aye, Captain. C2C has the shields up.
