It is important that you know what a secure website is. We’ve just learned of the breach to Mailchimp, the recent acquisition by financial software giant, Intuit.
That is a big deal since Mailchimp is one of, if not THE best known email providers. Mailchimp provides the means for customers to collect and send bulk email to subscribers. The just got hacked.
That’s a big deal because Mailchimp’s clients include cryptocurrency companies and other large financial institutions. The hackers appeared to deliberately breach Mailchimp for a handful of those important companies.
There is a silent war going on between the bad guys and the good guys. Stealing behind a computer screen is a lot easier than bringing a gun into a bank! And everyone of us seems to be vulnerable.
I’ll never forget a speech I heard several years ago by Dan Schulman, the President and CEO of Paypal. His speech painted the picture of a ‘rain’ of attacks on all of us all day long. We never see the vast majority of them, but they’re there.
What’s this have to do with your site? Have you noticed that little padlock at the very upper left of your browser? That signifies that your site is secure because it encrypts information coming and going, and it also confirms that the owner of the site has been verified.
Without that tiny padlock in the upper left of the browser’s address bar, your site looks less secure and, for people who notice, you are losing traffic and sales.
It’s easy to obtain an SSL certificate, which is what you need, but if you lack one, you are probably at risk for other things that make your site vulnerable to attack.
Why should you care about a secure website?
Because the “gun” these cybercriminals use is code that can really make a mess of your site. I’ve rebuilt sites for musicians whose site was nothing but an error code, like the remains of a body blown to bits in war.
My site for jazz alto trombone was once hacked in a weird and damaging way. For some rewason, they thought it would be fun to replace every instance of the word “trombone’ with the misspelling of “trombane”. They also replaced the word “jazz” with “joss”. Luckily I had recent backups so I just had to restore my site.
But if you are not keeping regular backups, that one of those other things that is making you a juicy target for attack!
So take a look at that padlock. It is unlocked? Reach out to me and we can talk about fixing that.
