Retail stores are incredibly visible targets that handle an increasing amount of information. The servers of these companies are loaded with the credit and debit card information of – in some cases – billions of people. This is why malicious hackers tend to put these organizations in their crosshairs, and in many instances they have very little work to do in order to obtain a massive payoff.
Businesses in general need to invest more time and resources into bolstering their cybersecurity measures. While this pertains to all companies, period, the high-profile breaches related to stores like Target and Neiman Marcus carry significant weight in the retail sector. All it takes is one successful attack to trigger a wave of similar occurrences, and stores need to be on their guard if they wish to avoid financial and legal ramifications.
Threats are evolving
The Target breach is considered one of the largest to have ever occurred, with millions of customer cards being compromised. But this was not the only offensive of its kind. A process called SQL injection was discovered to be the culprit behind the attacks on Target and Michaels, among others. Not only that, but SQL injections continue to remain common and widely used by cyberthieves.
But contrary to popular belief, there is no one “cure-all” solution for dealing with malicious hackers. It is not about finding the one product that is going to solve every issue and plug up all possible entries – the attacks orchestrated by cybercriminals are much more sophisticated than that. Layered security – the use of several different programs to develop all-encompassing barriers – is the preferred strategy when handling sensitive or privileged information.
Faronics has the answers
No company is more aware of how diverse protections need to be than Faronics. That is why it offers such a wide variety of resources. Anti-Virus, for example, prevents known threats from entering the system and roots out the ones that have already nestled in. Anti-Executable deals more in unknown possibilities. Should a new piece of malware manage to slip past firewalls, Anti-Executable prevents it from carrying out malicious operations through the process of application whitelisting. The only programs that are going to run on the system are the ones that are approved, meaning that harmful code cannot go to work even if it is successfully installed.