Whatever sector you work in, whether you’re at the head of a large or small business, your work necessarily relies on IT tools on which the survival of your business totally depends. Furniture manufacturer or service provider, electrician or restaurateur: whatever goods or services you offer, your treasure is not only the product itself, but just as much the data you store, held on the computers at your workplace or on hard drives.
Short or long-term development plans, projects for your company’s future, personal data, technical patents or accounting reports: all this vital information for the running of your company could, from one day to the next, leak, disappear, be stolen or held for ransom, and your business would likely be brought to its knees as a result. We would like to warn you against this invisible yet currently fast-growing scourge: cybercrime.
Why hack your business?
You may believe yourself safe from such attacks against your company’s information systems. But as a business, you have far more to fear from a cybercriminal than a private individual: there are many reasons for attempting to compromise your IT systems.
Industrial espionage is a practice as old as the business world itself, but one that shows no sign of disappearing: on the contrary, the development of technical means tends to give a new lease of life to this form of unfair competition, carried out by rivals sometimes prepared to do anything to damage your business.
By hacking your information systems, rival companies – or simple ill-intentioned criminals – can sabotage months if not years of hard work: your development project, carefully built with your partners, or your brilliant technology, could disappear overnight. Competitors could also use the detailed information from your accounting reports to work out how best to harm your business, using a sales strategy tailored to your strategic weaknesses. Generally speaking, obtaining all the information on a competitor, even the most confidential and sensitive, gives whoever commissioned the cyber attack a significant head start.
The possibility of personal satisfaction is also likely. Whatever the size of your business, both the largest and the smallest companies regularly suffer cyber attacks from isolated individuals: an experienced hacker can, alone and with nothing more than a laptop, cripple an organisation employing dozens of people out of bitterness, revenge or greed. Indeed, a criminal who has seized your data can then carry out various fraudulent acts: selling information or patents, blackmail, or even identity theft.
How do these cyber attacks work and how can you protect yourself against them?
A cyber attack targeting your data can occur in two main ways:
Through a file mistakenly opened or downloaded. Indeed, it is not uncommon for viruses, malware and other malicious software to be slipped maliciously into deceptive emails designed to look like genuine correspondence sent to your company’s mailbox. If you or one of your colleagues ever makes the mistake of opening the files contained in one of these fraudulent emails, the PC used for the operation and any others connected to it in any way will be infected by a virus that can then either spy on all your actions, destroy your data, or copy it and send it to the criminal behind the attack.
Or, the attack can take place by means of a device deployed on site. If the cybercriminal enters one of your premises or comes into contact with one of your company’s computers, they can deploy several devices, ranging from ordinary-looking laptops to a single USB drive plugged into the device to be hacked for just a few moments.
You now realise that the threat of a cyber attack is very real and that your data faces a risk that is as terrible as it is constant, due to the growth of cybercrime. It’s hard to feel at ease once you grasp the full scale of the threat.
Chronodisk: A way to counter the damage caused by cybercrime
The purpose of this article, however, is not only to alarm you by making you realise the scale of the threat posed by cybercrime, but also to offer, at the same time, concrete solutions to give you greater peace of mind regarding the likelihood of suffering a cyber attack.
First of all, prevention is better than cure! Our advice for safeguarding your company’s data:
- Make sure you update your equipment! Updates to the main operating systems have the benefit of continually reducing the risk of cyber attack by rolling out ever more means of preventing new threats,
- Equip yourself with a firewall. Several companies offer highly effective software capable of blocking most of the malicious files that could compromise your data.
- Regularly back up all your important files, ideally on different storage media, which can be a way of ensuring that, even if a computer is hacked, you still have at least an earlier version of the deleted information.
Despite all these precautions, accidents will happen. If cybercrime worries you and the safety of your precious information causes you anxiety, don’t worry: in the event of an accident, one last solution exists, offered by Chronodisk.
Chronodisk is a company whose goal is to repair and limit the damage your data could suffer following a breach of your security systems. To this end, we offer, as with this article, support for our clients through informed advice on ways to strengthen the protection of their company’s data and constructive feedback on the solutions put in place. But above all, through the deployment of groundbreaking technical means (we hold proprietary and therefore exclusive methods for our services) dedicated to the full recovery of your data.
We handle all types of storage media: hard drives, SSDs, phones, NAS servers, RAID servers, USB drives, etc.
Whatever the amount of data lost and however it was erased, whether by accident or as a result of cybercrime, we will do everything we can to restore it as best as possible. Our technicians are experts who have been working in the field of data recovery for years, and our emergency services exist to respond to you very quickly without sacrificing the effectiveness of our service. Setting up services that are as fast as they are effective became a necessity given how the risks linked to cybercrime have evolved over the past 15 years. We hope you never lose a single byte of data, but if it does happen, our mission is to go and get it back for you!