To Update Or.. To Update

As we have mentioned in previous posts, the gaming industry is closely tied in many aspects to what we do here at Spore Creative. It is an influence on design, vocabulary and even the technology and code that we use to build your website (not to mention our “brief” gaming timeouts). Maybe you aren’t a gamer yourself so it would be understandable if you have missed all the news related to Sony Playstation’s security exploit that resulted in stolen user information from millions of accounts and caused the PlayStation Network (PSN) to go down for maintenance for more than 3 weeks. While it was not the sole contributing factor, the mistake made by multi-billion dollar Sony is one we see all too often in numerous small business websites as well, a simple failure to keep up with updates.

While some believe the attack on the PSN was carried out be a group or single professional hacker, experts have pointed out the severe weaknesses apparent in Sony’s system that would allow even a novice user to accidentally stumble through their security. One of the more dominant loopholes attributed to the attack’s success was a series of servers running outdated versions of Apache and Linux software. Just as we recommend to our clients, updates should be performed with regularity as they are your best defense against a hacked site. In the case of Sony, the intrusion resulted in 77 million compromised accounts, a downed network which lasted for more than 3 weeks; including access to the PSN store which remains disabled until at least the end of the month (ie millions in lost sales), and millions more spent on security research and investigations. While repercussion to your website may not be as severe, we ask you take away a lesson; that if a large corporation such as Sony can be such an easy target, imagine the risk to your own business or website if you do not keep up with updates.

Remember, if your time is short or you just don’t have the confidence to manage your site as efficiently as you believe it should be; site maintenance is a service we are happy to offer at Spore Creative. For a very reasonable price we offer a variety of services to assist you with your site as well as maintaining a backup and managing all updates to ensure minimal downtime and complete recovery in the event of an intrusion. For more details check out the main page @ sporecreative.com.