Last time, we talked a great deal about why you never want to go to court and the reasons that good attorneys will fight tooth and nail to keep you to out of court and away from judges/juries.
However, one of the sad truths of the Internet is that it’s easily possible to find yourself in a legal mess through almost no fault of your own if someone else infiltrates your site.
It might seem like an unlikely scenario, but if your site is hacked or taken over, you can find yourself with a great deal of legal difficulties. Even if you can clear your name quickly, your site, your account and your server could become evidence in a much larger case and you could easily find yourself shut out of even your backups as authorities, lawyers or others try to piece together what happened.
The problem is even worse if you store user data, in particular sensitive data such as credit card numbers and personal information, such as names and passwords. Not only do you face a potential breach of trust with your readers, but the authorities will likely want to know more about the hack and, at the very least, you’ll need to be offline while you figure out what happened and you could be found to be in violation of legal responsibilities you have to protect such data.
If you want your site to run smoothly and be free from interference from government and law enforcement, security is crucial. It’s not something you can be relaxed on, even if you think no one would take an interest in your site.
After all, it’s the ones who think they can’t get hacked or won’t get hacked that fall first. Not because their hubris draws out attackers, but because they fail to take the basic steps that can prevent a security meltdown. [Read more…] about Your Site, Your Security, Your Responsibility