Blog Entries

Businesses large and small must guard against outside threats each and every day. Businesses are constantly under attack and the weakest vulnerability will be exploited. These threats can come in all different forms from employees, hackers, or natural disasters. Each one can cause equal damage.

According to PC Magazine, “Forrester estimates that 39% of small businesses will “significantly upgrade their security environment” and 44% will “significantly upgrade their disaster recovery capabilities” this year.”

It’s even more important for small businesses to protect themselves from threats because the aftermath can be devastating.

The first step in protecting your small business is to have a Disaster Plan.

“According to the National Archives & Records Administration, 93 percent of companies that had trouble restoring their data after a disaster were out of business within 18 months.”

A disaster plan should include ways to prevent your data from being exploited. This can be done by defining proper policies within your company. It should also define how you are going to protect your data with procedure. If someone breaks your policy whether it be an employee, contract worker, or outside element you should have a procedure in place to make sure that data doesn’t get compromised. Finally, if your data is compromised, you need to be able to eliminate it from the public. If your proprietary information is being displayed on websites or other places on the Internet you need a plan to take that information down. This is where the services from webArgos becomes invaluable.

“With today’s technology and tools, keeping a business safe doesn’t have to be a difficult or time-consuming process.”

Here is my challenge to you…don’t think you have anything to worry about when it comes to protecting your intellectual property and confidential information online? Let us give you a sample of what is out there on your company…for free without any obligation. Everyday current and former employees, partners, and customers post information and documents on the web that they shouldn’t. This is done 75% of the time without maliciousness: either by mistake or thinking that the link they posted the information or document to was secure. We see only about 25% of the confidential and proprietary data that gets posted on the internet, be it on blogs, forums, open links, etc, come from someone or some party that wants to create harm against another.Still, no matter how the information got there, it is still doing damage to your company. The FBI acknowledges that nearly $300 billion (that is $300 with a very large “B”) each year to intellectual property (IP) theft. A portion of that comes from actions like social engineering and espionage. However, a significant portion also comes from companies being careless about how they protect confidential documents that describe their company’s future product roadmaps, new R&D processes, future marketing strategies, or eminent M&A activities.What I find moderately amusing is that companies still are spending a significant amount of money on network security but pay little attention to internal processes of how their employees, contractors, and vendors communicate internal, non-public information and documents to the outside world. In future blogs, I’ll be talking about simple and easy steps your company can take to reduce the threat of confidential information and IP loss. But, it all has to start with someone picking up the ball and running with it.Take care,

Tim Rhodes

When we begin working for a new client, we like to start by conducting an in-depth internet security audit to determine what threats currently face that client on the world wide web. While we are conducting that audit we look for the following things:

• Compliance with federal laws such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the Federal Information Security Management Act. This could include financial statement or other confidential documents that were inadvertantly posted on a publically accessible server.
• Business reputation damaging items, such as blog posts made by vindictive former employees. This could also include libelous comments made about key employees in the company.
• Intellectual property that has been posted on competitor, partner, or reseller sites. Often times third parties might not have strict enough company policies regarding what can be posted on the internet and what cannot.
• Brand, copyright, or trademark violations. We search the web to make sure that no one is misusing your brand or violating any of your copyrights or trademarks.

After we identify the threats currently facing our client, we work closely with that client to eliminate the threats. We start by finding and contacting the owners of the sites where the threat is posted, then continue to escalate the issue until it is resolved. We find that most threats can be eliminated without having to involve our legal team, but we are prepared to take legal action when necessary.

The final measure we take is to enroll our client into an ongoing monitoring program. In one of these programs we will continuously monitor the sites were threats were posted in the past to ensure ongoing compliance. We also actively search for new sources of threats and work with our clients to remove them on a case by case basis.

We have a variety of different ongoing monitoring programs to meet any company’s needs. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you!