Mother’s Day tornados and the digital data storm

Boy howdy, didn’t mother’s day get started early this past weekend. For me personally, the original plan was a traditional southern breakfast after an hour of researching the latest digital data storms. Regrettably, local sirens and alerts delayed the morning tradition of scrambled eggs and pink flowers.

While the National Weather Service issued tornado watches and warnings for almost every county throughout north Texas and the state of Oklahoma, loud sirens had many scrambling to sheltered areas. Those of us residing in this part of the USA are all too familiar with the danger Mother Nature brings during this time of year.

In fact, May and September have become very predictable months when catastrophic tornados and hurricanes are inevitable. You know it’s coming, you can’t prevent it, nor control which house gets hit. But we can control the impact or loss of personal items with the greatest financial value by preparing ahead of time.

This got me thinking about the daunting volume of alerts related to my professional career – waging war on data breaches. Unfortunately, data thieves are launching new attacks that have never been seen before, bypassing today’s prevention systems and targeting all of our data each and every month of the year, unlike the predictable monthly storm season.

The thought of any digital data storm is frightening but, like the spring storms of Texas, predictable. What we know is this: the bad guys are coming and what will be lost in the destructive path is our valuable data. Yet the vast majority hide in the cellar, hoping for a near-miss and counting on yesterday’s shingles.

As we experience more intense electronic storms due to advanced digital attack code, we need to begin preparing for the new norm. Resilient businesses, both small and large will take proactive steps to mitigate the risks of tomorrow’s threats.

As you can see from this weather alert, maps are an intuitive way to organize information and to take action. When a tornado comes, the required action is clear: grab your family, any personal belongings you can and take shelter. But, when the data breach storm threatens to behead us, most try the hide-and-hope-it-doesn’t happen-to-us tactic.

Map 1: Alert – Tornado watch

Map 2: Intelligence – Your data at risk to a data breach

Much like the national weather service does for weather alerts, here at MAX Risk Intelligence we are providing a data breach risk intelligence service, based on factual proof of concrete risks. Only, we’re warning about the very real financial risk you face when your data is stolen.  And, like the national weather service, we can help you understand the most likely path a data thief will take to compromise that data. So that you can take action and prepare for the worst, we combine this intelligence to empower you to know what you absolutely must know but probably don’t – the financial impact of a data breach before it occurs.

We have all heard the cliché – it’s not if the storm arrives, but only a matter of when. If that’s true, then intelligence should be used whenever possible to make informed decisions that reduce the overall liability your business is facing.

When the cyber security storm hits, the question will be what monetary value is at stake? Will it be $100 million or $1 thousand? MAX Risk Intelligence’s data breach risk intelligence enables you to know and make immediate decisions before the next round of sirens start.

By Billy Austin