The Longterm Costs of Getting Hacked

The headlines are full of stories of retail giants getting hacked. Their customers have endured identity theft and months of effort to repair their credit profile. But just because your website doesn’t have an e-commerce model does not mean you are immune to the damage a hacked site can inflict. What happens if your website is the victim of hacking?

The Hard Costs of Hacking

The hard costs are fairly easy to quantify since you get bills for them. They include:

• The cost for a developer to repair the damage
• Administrative costs of time spent communicating with outside vendors and clients
• Investment in preventative measures like moving to new hosting and preventative services
• Hours you or your web services company spend investigating, researching and working on the problem

The Soft Costs of Hacking

As troublesome and costly as the above expenses can be, there are also many soft costs associated with hacking that really add up.

• Loss of personal information
• Hacked sites can suffer long term damage to their Google search engine ranking. A recent survey shows that it may take months for SEO rank to return to normal.
• Loss of internal and external confidence in your management ability. Instead of using valuable team members’ time to provide value for your customers,  you’re using it to do damage control. There’s a lot of finger pointing and confidence suffers.

Just as you would insure your property, you need a plan to guard against website hacks so that you can continue to focus on your customers, rather than wasting valuable time on cleaning up from a hacking disaster.

For a free security analysis, simply contact us today.