"How Safe is Your Success" is a series of eight articles. Each article addresses a different aspect of a universal problem which is of particular importance to those who do business on-line. Most Internet users are at least aware there are dangers "out there", but few appreciate the real extent of those dangers, the possible (even likely) consequences, or the best, most practical and least expensive means of countering them. This series is intended to at least provide some useful awareness of the situation.
Part 1 - Introduction
We all appreciate that the perception of "success" in business is a matter of degree. Success to one person may be earning enough to pay the household bills on time, have three weeks holiday a year and a new car every three. Another may settle for nothing less than being able to fly first-class to their own overseas holiday home and lease a new luxury sports coupe every 12 months.
If you operate any sort of a business, online or off, your degree of success may range from mild to outrageous. On the other hand, if you are not having any success at all, you probably have other things on your mind than securing something that you don't yet have. It's not that this series doesn't apply to the yet-to-be successful – it certainly should – but they probably will not allot it a very high priority.
So in essence I am aiming this series of articles more at those who are successful, or who are at least well on the road to success, if only because they have the most to lose. But smart beginners will do themselves a great service by riding along also.
Success in business rarely comes overnight. While it is the uncommon exception to that rule that gets the publicity, success is much more often the result of steady progress towards a goal. That's making a complex effort sound simple, but however easy or difficult your progress, the fact that you are progressing is pleasant to contemplate.
Now, what I want to do is disrupt your pleasant reverie.
I want to shatter your calm, give you something to panic about and get you thinking about a lot of bad stuff. And I want to do that not because I am a nasty little man, but because I want to help you.
A lot of bad stuff has happened to a lot of successful people online and, with every day that passes, the odds increase that similar bad stuff will happen to you. The result could be as destructive as having every shred of your success wrenched from your grasp in the space of moments. Many thousands of businesses, big and small, have gone to the wall because they didn't adequately prepare for the bad stuff I am going to tell you about.
But first I guess I need to give you a reason to read and believe.
Maybe you recognize my name from various online discussion forums, or maybe you jumped ahead and looked at the attribution at the bottom of this article — either way you may think you know that my speciality is computer and Internet security. Note that I said "think you know", because that's only partly right. Some of my associates describe me as a "technical writer", but that's not quite right either. My interest is in presenting relatively technical topics in a non-technical manner that can be easily understood by non-technical people, so I guess "non-technical writer" would be more accurate. I particularly don't like the terms "technical writer" or "security specialist" because they tend to frighten off the very people I strive to help.
Computer and Internet security are very wide-ranging and complex topics – so much so that even experienced experts specialize in just a subset of the whole. This may be part of the reason that a perception has developed among the general online populace that anything related to "computer security" is too difficult to be tackled by anyone other than an expert.
So consider the enigma we are presented with if that's all true.
On the one hand, you'd have to be bereft of all five senses and living on Mars not to know there is a sub-culture of Internet denizens who get their jollies by interfering with, stealing from and generally harming other people. We all know this. Logically we must then understand that if we connect to the Internet, we become potential victims of these cyber-grubs. But, on the other hand, we just know that we are powerless to do anything about it because it's "all too hard".
The big corporates are OK – they can afford to hire those experts and specialists I just spoke of. But what about the non-IT-expert, the average computer user and/or small business operator – what do they do for protection?
Well, I am going to let you in on a little secret. A secret that, if you take it seriously, just may save your business in the not too distant future.
A lot of what you have been led to believe is complete garbage.
Many experts treat average PC users as if they are imbeciles; many others know better but they want you to think you are an imbecile anyway. It's in their vested interests to have you thinking like that. As long as you "know" that security is just "too hard" there'll be an inflated demand for their services.
Don't get me wrong. There are some security issues that really are very complex and well beyond the ken of mere mortals. Such situations do demand the services of highly skilled specialists. Even basic security relating to mid- to big-business networks requires extensive technical knowledge.
But as a small business operator, there is an awful lot you can do to safeguard against ever getting into a compromised situation, and to safeguard the privacy and integrity of your data.
That is, to safeguard the success you have already attained as well as that still to come.
In Part 2 well look at one of the biggest weaknesses in your Internet interactions – the web browser. And no, it's not going to be a knock-Internet-Explorer-fest. Throughout this series we are going to stick to practicalities and realities.
In the meantime I'd like to leave you with some homework. Here's a link to a detailed article I wrote concerning some urban myths about browsers:
http://hackersnightmare.com/FreeContent/BrowserWars.pdf
About the Author
Bill Hely is an Australian technologist, consultant and author whose professional focus has been on advising and supporting small business operators in IT and Office Productivity - and rescuing them when they didn't heed his advice the first time around. He is the author of several books on technology for the business person, including the Bible of Internet and PC security "The Hacker's Nightmare" - http://HackersNightmare.com