Do you know the digital footprint of your business? It’s probably larger than you think, and may be more important than you think, too.
While the digital footprint of your business is core to your brand and reputation, it also extends your ‘attack surface’—by which we mean the vulnerabilities that can be found in your digital environment (hardware and software) that someone could use to attack your business.
The digital footprint of your business includes your website and your social media accounts: things that are definitely under your control.
It would also include; reviews and ratings from customers and employees on external sites, inbound links from other sites, news items, web directories and so on. These things are not, typically, under your control, and could affect your reputation, but are not likely to pose a security risk.
And then there’s the middle ground: the third-party apps that you use as part of your business processes, but which you do not own. These might include; Trello, Slack, Teams, Freshbooks, Intercom, Dropbox, Zoho Social, Salesforce and so on.
It could also include any third parties used to speed up your website by hosting your assets, such as CloudFlare, or Wistia. And what about your website hosting service itself?
The first step to understanding and protecting your digital footprint is to understand it: how big it is, and where the boundaries are.
To do this, you’ll need a list of your own assets (things that you control) and of all the third parties that you use. Although, this isn’t always straightforward. Employees may bring their own devices to work and join your internal network—or they may work from home. Departments may be using software as a service (and social media accounts) that you don’t yet know about.
Until you make a start, though, you won’t know where the boundaries of your footprint are, or how easy it would be for an attacker to get through them.
Need some help? Give Click and Protect a call on 0113 733 6230.
