Regardless of the size of your business, when it comes to cyber security, we’re all equal. Unfortunately, equality means we’re all under the same threat of becoming victims to cyber crime. Hackers don’t actually have any bias regarding enterprises – any system is good enough to hack. Some are more challenging than the others, but the value of “good practice” isn’t neglected, either. In fact, a cyber-attack occurs every 39 seconds.

Therefore, cyber security is a matter of utmost importance in your company. It’s just as valuable as cutting costs, and we all know how much that means to any business. Actually, by hiring a highly experienced company to conduct cyber security tests, you will acknowledge all your weak points and prevent grave consequences.

One of the ways around this is the so-called Penetration Testing (Pen Testing). As the name suggests, it tests how much a business is prone to attacks by both internal and external users.  Pen-Testing simulates a cyber-attack and its aftermath. This way, a company is able to notice what measures should be taken in order to prevent intruders from stealing their data. Penetration Testing is also an invaluable tool when talking about employee education, since they can be presented with the steps and see how a system is hacked in a simulated environment. Hence, the basic line of cyber resistance is formed when every employee understands how a violation of security can occur, and more importantly, how to prevent it.

Pen-testing falls under the definition of ethical hacking, since it is basically hacking with a higher purpose and it’s highly desirable and extremely useful. There are various tools for it, but you should be extremely careful with who you trust. A plethora of penetration tools exists online, which can be nothing else but cleverly disguised malicious software, designed to collect all the company’s information and abuse it.  For this reason, always hire a trusted source!

Now, let’s take a look at just why exactly you should be always at the top of your game when it comes to cyber security and which situations you are trying hard to avoid.

Ransomware

Considering just how much of your data is stored online, you can only imagine the kind of chaos that would take over should all the data suddenly become unavailable. If your cyber security system isn’t good enough, you’re risking huge damage. Last year, the overall cost of ransomware was $5 billion.

What hackers do here is prevent you from accessing your data and asking money for it, much like a ransom. Unfortunately, businesses are more than willing to pay for it since information unavailability is costing them every minute, not to mention the possible loss of trust with the customers should their data leak into public.

Reparation costs

It’s much better to invest in prevention than repairing the whole system in the aftermath of a potential cyber-attack. After all, it all comes down to money, and cyber-attack cost estimates are far from negligent. Depending on the type of attack, it could take you quite a while to repair all the holes in your security shield, and introduce new safety measurements, which again require time to educate the staff about them. Time is money, and why would you waste it on another set of cyber security instructions instead of doing it right the first time?

Industrial espionage

In case you’re imagining hackers just randomly picking targets for their own amusement, you couldn’t be more wrong. Your competitors on the market are genuinely interested in your business, and not all of them are to be trusted. The days of employee spies are over. Now, it’s much more convenient to hire someone to hack into your system and steal your genuine ideas.

To sum up, if you’ave had second thoughts about investing into a cyber-security professional and scanning your system from top to bottom, we hope we’ve helped you to realise just how dangerous it is. What’s especially worrying is the time needed for a cyber-attack to be revealed, which is 205 days. There are high chances your company’s data is already being used elsewhere, so you had better raise your security to a high level, which is actually the only acceptable one.