Why Security Matters for Marketers?
Online assets hold more value than ever, meaning that if bad actors tamper with anything we’ve published (even if it doesn’t contain sensitive data), it could cost us our reputations.
While most marketers may not always hold cybersecurity as a top priority, that quickly needs to change, given the fast-evolving threat landscape. Courtney Brady, VP of marketing, ThreatBlockr, shares why security should matter a great deal for marketers and three essential tips to implement better security awareness programs to help their teams become more vigilant.
As a marketer, cybersecurity might not be top of mind for you. After all, it’s generally the job of IT or security to keep company assets secure…right?
Well, online assets hold more value than ever, meaning that if bad actors tamper with anything we’ve published (even if it doesn’t contain sensitive data), it could cost us our reputations. Think about the horror stories of marketers’ social media accounts that were compromised and tampered with in the form of unsavory posts or videos appearing on company pages. It makes us cringe. Because in today’s digital age, online reputation is everything.
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Why Cybersecurity for Marketing?
While many organizations might view marketing as “fluff” and disregard cybersecurity for marketing departments, we need to realize that marketers touch a lot more essential company assets than we may think.
As I mentioned, when bad actors tamper with public-facing assets, your organization’s credibility can be affected drastically. Think of all the valuable pieces of company information displayed on your website and how many visitors you’re driving to it per week (and one of your goals is probably to drive more traffic to that site, too!). Now, think of all those visitors seeing the wrong information due to a hacker gaining access to your site editor and messing with your website. This type of attack may not involve sensitive data, but it could still create a seismic effect on your organization’s reputation.
In addition, the marketing department holds a significant piece of responsibility for the website and possibly has access to sensitive data in this way. While the more technical staff like IT, development, or security might also share this responsibility, marketing often owns the “keys to the kingdom” just as equally as any of those other departments. In fact, the oWASP foundation, which focuses on web application security, identified Broken Access Control as the top threat to web applications. It stands to reason why this threat, defined as “permitting viewing or editing someone else’s account, by providing its unique identifier” is a top issue. After all, if someone malicious gains access to your company credentials and can make changes, regardless of who originally owned those credentials, there’s no telling what could happen.
Three Cybersecurity Tips for Marketers
With all this said, what are the best ways for marketers to protect their departments from cyber-attacks? Here are a few tips I recommend that every company, regardless of size, consider:
Be selective when creating your marketing tech stack
Think about your marketing tech stack: how many different tools, widgets, and other pieces live on your website or interact with it? Unfortunately, any of these components could become a liability, if a bad actor tampers with them. To prevent your marketing tech stack from becoming a backdoor into your company’s website, it’s essential to be cautious when choosing new tools.
Marketing can become a game of using “fancy tools,” with solutions like heat maps, chat features, and automated data analyzers piquing our interest. Getting caught up in the “latest and greatest” is easy, but it’s more important to bring IT and security into the conversation and ensure that everything you bring into your tech stack is secure. Adding even a single line of new code to your website without prior research could be the slip-up that causes damage later.
Implement security awareness training for your team
Your marketing tech stack is only as secure as the people who use it. If your team isn’t familiar with good cybersecurity practices, it’s only a matter of time until someone clicks on a phishing link and compromises their credentials because of a weak password.
The sad truth: a majority of people don’t even think about security. In fact, the most common password, used over 100 million times worldwide, is “123456”. This simple password can be cracked in less than a minute! Your marketing team and peers across your organization will likely benefit from discussions about cybersecurity best practices.
Research and discuss cybersecurity
Before you can spread the word about cybersecurity amongst your team members, you must first understand it yourself. And no, that doesn’t mean you need to get too deep into the weeds about cybersecurity. But, regularly researching cybersecurity basics can make a big difference. After all, research is what we do best as marketers!
It’s also important to stay in the loop of cyber-attacks, especially when they affect your industry. Hackers will often work through industry verticals, so it’s imperative to know if similar organizations are affected by attacks.
To begin researching cybersecurity, you can start following relevant pages on social media or be the one who starts conversations about it in your current networks. Connect with other marketers within your current LinkedIn groups or Slack channels. By starting this conversation, you’ll spread awareness and gain insights from others who might also be working towards a better risk posture for their own organizations.
See More: 4 Key Components To Evaluate To Choose the Right Security Solutions
Making Your Marketing Tech Stack More Secure
Rather than taking this as a laundry list to add to your already-full plate, I hope these tips can become new opportunities to engage with other marketers on great innovations and work towards a better-streamlined marketing tech stack (after all, a more selective tech stack isn’t just good for your security, but for training new team members and making processes more efficient too!).
And in the end, we need to remember that keeping our slice of the internet secure means that we’re contributing to a better and safer place for our own communities, family members, and friends.
Are you implementing security awareness programs for your marketing teams? Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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