Over the years, cyber attacks have become more and more of a hazard. We’ve, in fact, reached a point at which cyber crime is one of humanity’s greatest threats. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it’s stated for a good reason. Data breaching has evolved into a dauntingly sophisticated and unrelenting menace, as you can see by the following stats:
- In 2013, a breach in Adobe led to massive account leaks; the number is estimated to reach 15 million.
- In April 2011, Sony was hacked, resulting in the personal data of 77 million people being put online;
- In 2014, Yahoo was the victim of a cyber attack that affected around 500 million (!) of users.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too — thousands of attacks like this have been performed and continue to go on today.
Perhaps one of the scariest aspects of cyber crime is that it’s a continually changing affair. When a new kind of attack surfaces, cyber security eventually figures out a way to protect people from its effects. As a consequence, hackers regularly have to change their game to strike from an unknown angle.
This kind of arms race has given us a myriad of cyber crime methods that still lurk on the World Wide Web. Worms, DDoS attacks, spyware, and many others can, at best, cause annoying setbacks and financial losses. While we can shield ourselves against the most popular ones, the sad truth remains that you can’t be positively sure of your cyber safety.
Among all of these cyber attacks, a pattern can be seen. Just look at the stats mentioned a few paragraphs ago. What do they have in common?
All of them relate to accounts being leaked or stolen. There’s no big hack that steals a million dollars directly from a bank. Rather, it’s people’s personal data that’s the coveted prize for the cyber criminal.
And that’s precisely what puts the accounting industry in cyber crime’s crosshairs.
By its nature, accounting heavily interacts with this kind of sensitive data. It may handle personal information about clients, employees, employers, vendors, customers, etc. That’s a lot of commercial data for a hacker to use by infiltrating a single point.
A common misconception claims that it’s only the big names that need fear getting hacked. Small accounting firms are just as likely to suffer large scale cyber strikes as world famous companies. Just because they don’t appear on the news as often doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable to hackers.
As a matter of fact, small to medium sized companies may stand a greater risk of a cyber attack than their massive counterparts. Being a comparably low profile gives these firms a false sense of safety, and that often leads to lax security measures.
Other potential reasons include budgetary restraints or poorly organized infrastructures, but it’s typically ignorance to danger that exposes accounting companies to cyber attacks.
With all this in mind, the best way to curb the threat of cyber crime is to take it seriously. Educate both employers and employees about cyber perils, set up a cyber security program and update it regularly, and organize regular security audits to make sure everything’s up to snuff.
These procedures will undoubtedly go a long way to minimizing the danger you face of a cyber crime.