Sunday, April 17, 2016

On getting your WordPress site hacked; pay now or pay more later

In my last post I posed the question of whether it's time to look for alternatives to the leading publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., but, truth be told, finding an alternative that can do everything these products do is practically impossible … that is, unless you're willing to spend money building a customized solution.

And that may be the reality of the future; if you don't build your own solution paying upfront at perhaps 100x the cost (thanks, Keith) of, say, a simple WordPress installation, you'll windup paying far more than that when you get hacked. According to IBM's tenth annual Cost of Data Breach Study:

The study found the average consolidated total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million representing a 23% increase since 2013. The study also reports that the cost incurred for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information increased six percent from a consolidated average of $145 to $154.

So, do you want to go with what will be, more-or-less, an off-the-shelf solution and roll the dice hoping you don't get hacked or do you build your site to last? Do the former and eventually get hacked and your cyber insurance may not pay out. Do the latter and you have an argument for having done everything you could and your insurer may have no basis to argue with you.

And consider this: Having insurance to cover the costs of a cyber attack is one thing, losing business and the trust of your customers is quite another. The former covers immediate loss, the latter, which won't be covered, can cost far more.

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Mark Gibbs — Contributing Editor

Mark Gibbs is an author, journalist, and man of mystery. His writing for Network World is widely considered to be vastly underpaid. For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books about networking, information technology, and the social and political issues surrounding them. His complete bio can be found at http://gibbs.com/mgbio. [mg]


Source: On getting your WordPress site hacked; pay now or pay more later

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