Why does security really matter for me and our organization

For many of us, we know that security is important but it is a lot of steps, a lot of things to remember, and two-factor authentication can feel like such a pain.  Michael Levan, the Center’s System Administrator, answers some frequently asked questions about security, and why it matters for you and for the whole organization and the clients we serve.

Security doesn’t seem that important for me personally. I don’t really have anything important in my email or computer anyway.

Once your computer is hacked, anything you do on your computer could be seen or collected by a malicious attacker. How many times have you used your computer to go on Amazon? Or Ebay? All of these logins you do daily have information about you: your last name, address, credit card number, bank card number, security questions, or even your social security number.

Also, you are putting everyone in the organization potentially at risk – and their private information.

The attacker receives credentials for an employee’s account. Once this attacker is on the employee’s profile within our network, they have access to everything including emails, network drives, and search history. At this point, an attacker could inject a piece of malware into one of the many documents on our network, for example. When someone opens that document, then another, then another, that malware spreads across the network – allowing the hacker access to data from anyone in the whole organization.

Another perfect scenario is email. Let’s say an attacker gets into an employee’s account that has a lot of important email addresses in it: clients, partners, funders, etc.  An attacker can easily email blast all of these people and have that email contain a piece of malware or a phishing attempt. Chances are, the email will be opened if it comes from a credible source (you!) and now all of those people’s data is at risk.

I know client data should be secure but who would seriously want to hack in and learn about the people I work with?

Malicious black-hat hackers, as they are called, don’t care about who you work with or what they do. They care about things like names, where they could be at certain times, where they could be shopping, where they could be having lunch. It’s not so much the “who” factor, it’s “what can I get out of this person”.

These days my data is all over the internet anyway!  I’ve probably been hacked a bunch of times already so what’s one more time?

One more time is the difference between your bank account being wiped. The difference between waking up with a 750 credit score one morning and a 400 the next because someone somehow got your social security number. The “it’s only one time” factor plays a big part from a human-nature perspective. There are a ton of things that could happen in that “one more time” that can turn your life upside down, or that of your colleagues or clients, in more ways than 1.

For some bonus reading, learn more about different attacks, and what we are protecting against (what is a Trojan?  a worm? a virus?)