We are Legion
No we are not. Now that I have your attention, what was the first thing that came to your mind when you read the title? Hacking, Security, Dark Web, etc right?
Now the moment you get an email from you bank like “Dear Customer, Your transaction at 181919000067204,Ireland using Debit Card XX7001 from your account on 30-11-2016 03:34:45 IST could not be processed due to Unauthorized Usage. The transaction reference No is 123456789. For assistance call our 24 Hrs Customer Contact Centre”, you will drop whatever you are doing and will immediately do whatever it takes to make sure your money is safe and make sure all the necessary security measures are in place to avoid such further incidences.
While this may be extreme example, the point I am trying to make is, how many times have you taken enough security measures to make sure that the money you are spending on your brand or campaign is not getting wasted due to a hack or any other such attack? The answer most probably is zero, unless it is an ecommerce site involving a financial transaction. But what about a simple landing page or microsite, that will not cause any financial loss right? WRONG. Consider the situation below.
Let’s say you are running a campaign getting visits to the website at a Cost per Click of INR 10 and you are getting a steady traffic of around 5000 users because of that.
Now because of some vulnerability, say your server slows down drastically to the point that opening the site takes minutes instead of seconds and the users clicking your ad and visiting your site never actually get to see it. Now the financial loss due to this will be INR 50,000 for every 24 hours of such a downtime.
Now you see the financial implication of bad security implementation?
While this was probably a very basic and simple example, the sad truth is that such losses are barely tracked or even accounted for since there is not direct metric for this. This will only get worse with the ever increasing spends on digital and ever increasing adoption and push for the same. Isn’t it time these losses are minimized and accounted for so that every Rupee spent adds value and not just disappear without a trace?
