When 'The Interview' Goes Wrong

No, not the applying-for-a-new-job type interview, although what to do when one goes wrong would be another great blog post entirely.

Instead, I'm talking about today's latest fallout from the Sony Pictures hacking debacle — that their Christmas release of 'The Interview' would be pulled entirely after threats of violence convinced several theatre chains to drop it.

Details and full analysis of the situation belongs elsewhere; instead I'd like to remind readers of the importance of maintaining good security practices with their digital media.


Now, you likely don't have a treasure trove of feature films and Hollywood secrets stored on your computers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take security for granted.

While no strategy is guaranteed to be 100% effective, here's a brief checklist of what you should be doing at a minimum:

• For all of your digital channels that are a part of your business, make sure you maintain strong passwords for both yourself and all other people who have access. This goes for your website CMS, social media networks, e-commerce logins, and anywhere else where a username and password is required to gain access. You may want to use a secure password generator in conjunction with password management services such as LastPass. 
• Enable SSL security on your website(s). Adding a layer of encryption helps mitigate the risk of data passed to/from your server being read and compromised by hackers. If you have a form on your site that requests any type of personal user information, please consider this option. (Plus, all other things being equal, Google is starting to rank sites with SSL security a bit higher than those without). 
• Do occasional security audits that check for SQL injection hacks and other common malicious attack vectors. These help identify security holes in your website's programming, enabling you to fix issues before they become a liability.

Over the years we've seen our share of attacks that have ranged from utterly harmless to potentially very damaging. One thing is for certain — the attempts to wreak havoc will never stop. But by proactively "raising shields" instead of thinking it'll be less costly to just deal with any potential aftermath, the better your business and the users who trust you will be in the long run. 

-Jeff