If you think you’re too small or you have too little information for a hacker to care about your customer’s private information, think again. These malicious individuals go after all types of businesses. Both the public and private sectors are hit every day. Not only will your customers be impacted, but your business will too. Here are a few of the ways different industries are impacted.
Health Care
First, as a business, you can be held accountable for HIPAA violations. This happened to Massachusetts General Hospital. Their database was accessed illegally and data was compromised. Data breaches in health care lead to fines and lawsuits. Second, you may have to pay for identity theft monitoring. This is especially true when social security numbers are accessed. You also may end up with a poor reputation among your current patients and potential ones.
Education
You may think that no one would want to access a school’s database. Afterall, what good is the information of a student? What does it take to steal an identity? Name, address, and date of birth are often enough. That information is all contained in every school’s database. If it’s a private school, data breaches may capture parent’s banking information as tuition payments can be received electronically. Not only will the institute’s reputation suffer but they’ll have to pay for monitoring for both students and parents.
Entertainment
Restaurants have more credit card transactions than most businesses. Although the entire card number isn’t stored, there’s still a great deal of information available in their point of sale system. Entertainment venues like theatres, trampoline parks and theme parks often have email addresses and phone numbers for promotional purposes. Through masking, unscrupulous people can use that information to send malicious links that infect user’s computers and steal data.
The first half of this year has seen a 54% increase in data breaches over last year. That means your business is more at risk than ever before. If it hasn’t happened to you yet and you don’t have the proper protection and network infrastructure, you could be risking your reputation, your customer’s data and your entire business. Toucan Technology Group can help protect your business. We offer network security, data backup and monitoring. Call us today at (317) 376-4874 or fill out our contact form for more information.
