The latest denial of service attack
The internet was attacked by cyber criminals on October 21, taking Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, CNN and several other popular websites offline for hours.
The internet was attacked by cyber criminals (terrorists) on October 21st this year. The incident took offline some of the most popular sites on the web, including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, CNN, PayPal, Pinterest and Fox News – as well as newspapers including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. This outage lasted several hours.
If your website should be attacked or goes down for any reason, join the club. The largest websites in the world with hundreds of people who are working full time on them have been targeted. It’s a reality in our internet and post-internet world.
Constant Vigilance
We could go on about the causes of this attack and about the fact that it is probably only the tip of an iceberg (so to speak). The fact is that it reminds us that we have to be ever vigilant and proactive in the protection of our web assets. The fact is that there are people out there looking for weaknesses in our websites and when they find them they do everything they can to either steal information or take the site down.
Do we have to be afraid? No – but we do need to keep working at the problem. The fact is that if you had a bricks and mortar store, there has always been a risk of theft and violence. The Internet is no different just more complex.
Security measures that worked a year ago may no longer be effective on their own. Security needs to be layered to continue to cover all the loopholes.
Security and content managed websites
There are many ‘boxed’ solutions for ecommerce and content management that people want to use today. They are good on the surface and some of them work quite well. However, they come with the inherent danger of having “holes” and potential security breaches. What that means is that a responsible web development company needs to be contracted to continue to monitor the website once it is launched. If it’s not monitored and adjusted you run a much higher risk of credit card or identity theft, or the theft of important and private data. Hardware and software need to be monitored, adjusted, revised and added if you want to reduce the risk of attack and loss.
Learning from Home Depot
That’s what we can do for you at Dunham Web and Dunham Connect. A website should never be launched without professional vigilance today. We can learn this from Home Depot, Amazon, Yahoo, PayPal and many other major corporations. We’re all the same…we are vulnerable to these criminals, but we can do our best to secure ourselves in the hope that we will not ever see one of these cyber violations.
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