Within recent weeks, there have been two data loss incidents which have been widely reported, from a large national oil company who have suffered from a cyber-attack to an individual who lost everything as hackers managed to gain access to his iCloud account. It is now imperative that if you value your data, you will do your all to ensure that it is appropriately protected.
The world’s largest oil firm, Saudi Armco, was successfully targeted by hacking group The Cutting Sword of Justice. They used a computer virus, known as Shamoon to cause the damage which resulted in 30,000 workstations being affected.
All the affected workstations have now been fully restored and have been added back onto the internal network. It did take a bit longer for the website to be brought back online and for their email service to be in full working order, the impact of this data loss has been significantly reduced due to the data protection measures that were in place.
This attack demonstrates the importance of adequately protecting your data, be it business data which if lost, could have a detrimental impact on your company or personal data such as family photographs which are priceless. Keeping one copy of your data is becoming more unsecure as each day passes and can cost thousands of pounds to recover your data if it hasn’t been properly backed up.
This is shown when stories about Matt Honan’s data loss experience were published when he had his iCloud account hacked. This resulted with hackers wiping his iPad, iPhone and MacBook. Hanon had to pay for the services of a data recovery specialist who managed to recover around 75% of the deleted contents but this came at a cost.
Honan stated, “The bottom line is that I have all my photos and all the home movies I’ve shot. Every one of them. And seemingly all of my most important documents as well. That felt like a miracle. The bill for all this? $1,690. Data doesn’t come cheap.”
At the end of the day, it comes down to how much you value your data. There are several ways to backup your data from USB hard drives and tape to independent cloud backup services. Due to the vast range of products that are available, there is a solution out there which will protect your data and save you time and money in the event of a disaster.
Do you value your data? Do you protect your data?
