Why hack me?
When we are doing post-breach cleanup for new clients, many of them ask us the question, “Our business is not that interesting, so why would anyone hack me?” They may be a restaurant chain who thinks the only items of value they have are recipes that aren’t very hard to reproduce, or they could be a nonprofit who “just does performances”.
The fact is, they all have juicy bits of data that can mean a lot to an attacker. Most of them collect credit cards from customers, they do online banking, and they have payroll information that can be used to build a fake identity that enables an attacker to do more crimes. Even if the hacker is not after your money, your computer’s processing power is valuable when attached to several thousand other compromised machines. Ten thousand computers can crack a password a hell of a lot faster than one…
The Wall Street Journal has some startling statistics in their article, here.