Yahoo….500 Million email accounts were hacked in 2014!! The increasing threat of Cyber attacks on websites is not slowing down as the internet and broadband continues to grow around the globe. As the internet expands so does the threat against every person private or maybe not so private information. As vulnerabilities grow for many companies how do companies large and small protect their image and most of all their customer information? The best type of defense is a great offence and in the cyber world this means making sure a companies network, data center, intellectual properties and customer information has the best cyber security measures on place.
Too many times we read on the news how companies fail to protect their greatest asset, their customers information. It took Target many years to recover from their network being hacked and millions of customer credit card information being stolen. Home Depot followed suite year later and hand their network hacked and jeopardizing critical customer information. Today, its Yahoo that has ended up announcing that over 500 million email addresses had been hacked in 2014. This news comes out months after Verizon agreed to purchase Yahoo for 4.83 Billion dollars. The breach has been LABELED as the larges cyber security breach to date.
Companies large and small are in a mode of hiring security experts in an industry where few experts exist. There is a shortfall of this specialized cyber security talent and with this sort of GAP we can be sure the bad guys will not slow down in gaining personal information to sell on the cyber black market.
The image of companies are tarnished when these sorts of attacks take place and the recovery time can be years. The end result is loss revenue, a tarnished image and customers losing trust in companies. Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other become a platform where customer voice their concerns. Companies can also use the social network platforms to communicate to their customer what they are doing to correct the problem. A key marketing avenue to help recover a tarnished brand.