For some light humor!
1) You really enjoy waking up in the morning with your coffee, hitting your homepage, and finding a new page marketing ‘special offers’ for ‘enhancement’ products… You spill your coffee, burn…ouch.
2) You just love getting a hosting bill showing your site had somehow managed to use 4 terabytes of data last month, even though your site is actually just 3 small pages.
3) You appreciate the Friday afternoon calls from 2 of your largest customers, saying that they are switching to your competitor due to some aggressive marketing they’ve received… Hmm, wonder how your competition knew how many kitty trinkets your biggest customer ordered last week?
4) You relish the thought of not being able to send your weekly newsletter to your regular customers, since, for some reason, no emails are getting through and your hosting provider says you sent 1,540,098 emails in the past hour marketing Acai Beans. You sell catnip toys… Interesting.
5) You’ve had approximately 38.56 different people help you with your website, you’ve changed hosters 6 times, and attempted to change the registrar of your domain three times but gave up. You know what they say about too many cooks…
6) That great freeware guest- book system written by a kid in Slovakia with a name you can’t even pronounce you thought was really neat in 2003 is actually still on the site, but you’ve long forgotten about it being there. Google and the scammers didn’t forget though…
7) One of your designers installed a patch for your shopping cart 2 years ago and had problems. After googling for a solution for a few hours with no results they decided to chmod 777 * a few large directories. Voila, it works! And that’s the way it’s been for 2 years now. Lovely.
8 ) You enjoy explaining to your customers how their private information is now front page news, or worse, with their ex-wife’s lawyer!
9) The thought of having the marketing list you paid $10k for last year available to anyone is something you enjoy. Sharing and collaborating, that’s what the net is all about, right?
10) You enjoy negotiating with a faceless individual from somewhere overseas that speaks like this “u will knot get ur d8a bck ever again unlezz u pay $80.000 dollarz.”. It wasn’t just your corporate data, it was your friends and family as well… Ouch.. Get that wire transfer ready.
11) Finally… The end of the pain. Perhaps not. On top of all of the great ‘side effects’ of not scanning your website – You get sued, your family gets sued, and now the ‘authorities’ are looking into your business activities — because — surprise, surprise, there are laws surrounding data protection. Your business is kaput, your staff is leaving in droves, and everything you’ve worked for for years now is gone. You thought you were diligent in picking a hosting provider, team members for the design and development and other folks for the rest of your business. However, when it came to someone offering you a fresh set of eyes into your site’s security, you said no. No, we’re ok. We check. We’re fine. You thought website security scanning was like insurance. Perhaps it is. But we all miss it when we need it. In this case, you need it before you actually really need it. Because, by then, it’s too late.
Get the latest content on web security
in your inbox each week.
THE AUTHOR
