While no one at this point is unaware of the devastating effects COVID-19 has had on us societally, the economic effect of the virus and its cascading ripple effect upon a myriad of industries is only beginning.
We won’t attempt to predict the future of the economy, but we are confident in predicting one outcome of the current chaos: hacks and ransom-based cyber attacks will increase at an alarming scale.
With employees working from home and no meetings, gatherings, or sales calls happening via anything but the web and phone, digital assets are more vital to organizational continuity now than ever. This, paired with an abundance of free time for idle hands, and economic loss motivating malicious intent, breeds a “perfect storm” (per Crane Hassold, via this Wired Article) for hackers.
For our clients we’ve already seen an increase in general traffic, suggesting that the quarantine has more people leveraging websites than the prior average.
And we’ve also seen an uptick in malicious attempted activity against websites in general. We’re not the only ones; Zscaler has seen a 20% jump in hacking threats in March alone (per c|net).
Our concern is that organizations whose IT teams are already maxed out attempting to implement, support, and secure a work-from-home environment will be too taxed to adequately monitor and secure their websites. Those platforms, more important now than ever, will then lead to panicked downtime, loss of additional revenue or more if ransomed back, and will further disrupt business continuity and whatever chance we have at collectively instituting some level of economic stability.
Fixing a hack is far more disruptive and painful than preventing one.
"Addressing any kind of security issue is problematic, but dealing with a hack is terrible. First there is the discovery of the issue itself, which may catch you off guard and disrupt your business. Then there is the assessment of the damage--what did they get, what do they know, what else is compromised? Then the simultaneous stress of communicating what has happened and determining what to do about it.
Fortunately, when we were recently victims of a hack, we were already in touch with the Yoko team, who were able to quickly step in to help us diagnose and resolve the issue. And we believe we are in a better place security-wise than before. But it’s not something you ever want to happen. The fix and recovery still took significant time away from other efforts that could have been spent making progress, as opposed to attempting to get things back to how they were."
For that reason, we’re offering our full staff’s availability to perform free website security assessments to help determine if your site is at risk, and if it is, what you can do to secure it before it becomes an issue.
It’s totally free, and feels like a relatively small way we can help contribute some level of certainty and control in a time of vast uncertainty. If you’re interested, please complete the form below.
PLEASE NOTE: If you are a critical organization in the current crisis email us at questions@yokoco.com to ensure your organization is prioritized appropriately.
Critical organizations include hospitals and healthcare practices, emergency response, state, and regional governments and authorities, and vital media outlets.