The world around you is increasingly online. Thanks to rapidly advancing technology, more and more of daily life takes place on the internet. Likewise, much of the business done today takes the form of e-commerce, and social media is a massive marketing platform. This impacts every industry, to some degree or another, and professional soccer teams can and must take advantage of online tools to get by. This presents a number of problems concerning data security, however, and addressing those issues will prove to be paramount. Here’s what you need to know.
Your Website
Since the dawn of the internet, every business under the sun and many, many other organizations have needed websites to cater to internet users. This is especially important when your business model involves sales, such as the merchandise sold by sports teams. Building a website for your team is a necessity in modern life, but it requires additional security considerations.
First and foremost, a freshly purchased domain name will be missing an essential security feature in the form of TLS. What is TLS? Simply put, it’s an encryption and decryption service, and the purpose of it is to protect the data of your website and its users. Encryption is the process of scrambling information so that the wrong audience can’t make heads or tails of it, and decryption is the process of returning that data to its original state using a cipher. Without the proper cipher, hackers that intercept your data will find it illegible and completely worthless, and encryption protocols generate a new cipher for each exchange.
Your App
Businesses of all kinds, up to and including sports teams, can use apps to keep customers and/or fans engaged with the brands themselves and the products and/or services they provide. Likewise, a sports team can make use of an app to give customers a quick reference for the team’s schedule, and it can also serve as another outlet for e-commerce. The development of this kind of e-commerce app is relatively accessible thanks to APIs, but those APIs have a secret downside. Simply put, your app will necessarily inherit any security flaws present in the API, and this allows hackers to use an API to identify weaknesses present in apps that have been developed using that API. Therefore, no e-commerce app can be considered complete and safe without investing in API security that can help to identify security flaws and fix them in the code itself.
Your Network
While e-commerce outlets represent multiple potential points of failure for data security, they also lead directly back to your team’s network. Network security has its own challenges, of course, starting with the humble act of logging in. Simply put, passwords are quickly becoming a thing of the past due to their limitations in the digital age. Hackers can use advanced software to rapidly create possible passwords until it finds the right combination of characters. While this wouldn’t be a viable tactic for human hackers, “brute force” software can make up to millions of attempts per second.
Multi-factor authentication is quickly becoming the new standard for login security for that reason. On the other hand, network traffic monitoring software can allow you to anticipate and then prevent cyberattacks, because it can reveal suspicious activity such as brute forcing, giving you a window of time in which you can take counteractions. Automated countermeasures are also important, so consider the implementation of intrusion detection and prevention software to take care of a cyberattack in progress. Last, but not least, antimalware software is essential for cybersecurity. While malware is easily avoided by savvy internet users, it’s so ubiquitous on unsecure sites that it could theoretically rear its head at any moment.
Your professional soccer team has enough to worry about on the field, but hackers are an omnipresent threat online. Protecting your team, its players, and its fans depends on the right combination of tools and techniques, and this guide will help you cover your bases.
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