CERT responds to 11073 security incidents last year.

Thats 30 a day or one and a bit an hour, every hour of every day in Australia.  There are a mix of events, Government server hacks, large industry website and computer hacks, essential infrastructure systems, defence systems and your business website.

When Website Essentails, as hosting providers, received our first alert from CERT (see The Australian Article) we wondered who they were.  It was a low key entry into our world by this conglomerate of 6 different Government agencies, working together to prevent, find and alert malicious code, hacks, and extortion. As they say, threats to Australian businesses are also on the rise, as per this image of major events.

With all this, we still advocate the best protection levels you can achieve for your site, without locking it down and affecting visitors experience, or reducing your rankings on search.  But, this in itself is not enough.  A great multi tiered, multi resource backup and restore plan, with easy to find change history, and rolling 90 day backups is vital.  Keep em out if you can, but recover and get back to business as fast as possible.

PS, if ever you receive an alert from CERT, call us immediately and we will get the wheels rolling…”you’ve been hacked!”