Things are getting worse, not better…

I’ve been hacked three times in the last 6 years.

And each time, the hack was more insidious, more sophisticated, more threatening and more damaging.

I’m careful, very careful, but not as careful as I should have been in the beginning.

For example, I didn’t have a backup strategy. I was doing backups, but there was no real strategy to it because I relied on my hosting company at the time to do their “major” backups.

Boy, was that a mistake.

But before we get into that, let’s just look at what’s happened in the past few months and what’s expected to happen this year.

Since Thanksgiving – November, 2013 – hacking activity has been even more ruthless.

Start with Target…

If you shopped at the giant retail chain around Black Friday (Nov. 27 to Dec. 15), chances are your credit card information can be purchased on some eastern European black market for anywhere from $20 to $100.

That’s the going rate for stolen credit card data.

Target first reported that 40,000,000 (yep, that many zeros…) were pilfered in what was called a “meticulously planned and intricately coordinated attack to penetrate the retailer’s defenses and make off with a spectacular booty.”

That number has now surged to 110,000,000 cards stolen. The value of the heist was said to be nearly $5.5 billion.

Clearly identity theft is alive and lucrative, and getting even more so.

Target (and you if you own a business) have a responsibility to protect your customer’s data. That is not cheap.

What about your email?

This is becoming one of the biggest threats on the net today. I personally know two people who have had their email hacked, password resets intercepted, and lost their entire websites when the hacker had them transferred to their own account.

But that’s not as bad as one of GW & Wade’s clients. That firm manages about $4 billion in client financial instruments.

One client’s email was hacked and the hacker used the client’s information to move $290,000 from his personal account to the hacker in foreign transfers.

Not only did Wade have to restore the $290k to the client, but it was fined by the SEC another $250k for not protecting the client’s assets more securely.

Email hacking is becoming more common. According to a Senior Vice President of client services at Charles Schwab, they have seen a fivefold increase in email-related fraud over the past two years.

And then there is the DDoS with aWeber and others…

If you do marketing online, you were probably affected this past week by the distributed denial of service attacks that happened against some of the biggest companies we use every day: aWeber, Get Response, Meetup and others.

What is DDoS?

It’s not a hack. It’s just throwing so much traffic at a site that it cripples the servers. And done well with automated traffic bots, the site stays crippled until the company moves IP addresses, a costly and time intensive process that can keep a site down for days.

And then it can happen again, like it did with aWeber this week taking them down for nearly 4 days.

The consequences of that are severe:

1)   Can’t broadcast email

2)   Can’t collect opt-ins

3)   Can’t click on links if you’re tracking clicks

4)   And some people weren’t even getting their autoresponder messages

The fear, of course, was that you could lose your list database. That’s happened before, but not in this case. But it does make you aware that you MUST backup your aWeber lists on a regular basis too.

How bad is it going to get?

Those above scary enough, but now it’s going to get even worse according to Engineering and Technology Magazine.

These are the top 7 cyber-threats of 2014 as evaluated and analyzed by a private security firm called WatchGuard.

1)   Computer kidnapping – the CryptoLocker attack of 2013 was a hack that took over your computer and made you pay to get it back. This is called ransomware – a particularly bad strain of malware, and VERY lucrative for the hackers, which means there will be many imitators in 2014.

2)   Hacking the Internet of Things – As all of our devices are connected, expect more hacking of your car, phone, watches and medical devices. Nasty.

3)   Major state-sponsored attack – I’ve said for a long time that if our enemies came ashore in Long Beach, California, they would be met with the might of the military. The fact is that we’re being invaded daily by foreign states in an organized attempt to crack the system. It’s going to get worse.

4)   Harrassing the Obamacare site – It started out bad, but even now shows significant vulnerability. And of course, it’s an incredibly juicy high-profile target with a lot of valuable private data.

5)   High profile targets suffering chain-of-trust hack – When you trust a 3^rd party to allow them into your system, you’re basically increasing the risk of hacking exponentially. Expect a lot of penetration through the doors opened to trusted partners this year.

6)   Meaner malware – This is the ugly one for us small players. And the predictions are especially dire about new batches of malware that encrypt or, even worse, destroy all your data. The only recourse is to back up everything securely, often and in different locations so you can restore cleanly immediately.

7)   Exploiting cyber-psychology – in other words, those phishing emails and letters from grandma are going to get even more sophisticated so they look and feel like real communications.

It’s a scary world out there.

What’s your strategy to protect yourself?

When I was hacked the first time, I relied on the backups the host kept on a regular basis.

Except that wasn’t everything. And in fact, most of it was corrupt. And what wasn’t corrupted was infected with the very same malware.

So, I lost it all.

Bad stuff…

The last time we were hacked, we had multiple backups in different locations at regular intervals with great date and data integrity.

That made it easy to ensure that we had everything ready to back up as soon as we identified the infected files.

Having a strategy for backup is the key to restoring your business quickly. Sign up for a special webinar here to see how you can protect yourself.

Hacking happens.

But if you’re backed up offsite, you can move to a new host with minimal down time.

That’s why we’re doing this webinar with Regina Smola and her guest to help you build a back up strategy that protects you in any situation.

Click the continue button to register for free now.