How Thinking like a Criminal serves your organization?

Thinking like a criminal, quite literally putting yourself empathetically into the cyber hacker’s shoes, could be the very best way to protect your organization from cyber crime.

Let’s reverse engineer this. A scenario of not patching in a timely manner should include a cost-benefit analysis of a series of worst case scenarios. These would include data breaches, ransomware attacks that encrypt your data, account takeover losses and reputational damage. Up until this point you can consider how to defend yourself, but if you put yourself in the criminal’s shoes, you could be several steps ahead in thinking what steps and measures you can take to protect your business.

So the criminals are thinking: Is their target machine vulnerable yes or no? If yes, then they go onto their  hit list. If not, they will move on to easier prey. Don’t be the easy target. Once you have been identified as vulnerable and successfully attacked, you will likely see the same repetitive attacks, since you have now been identified as the weakest link.

So, thinking ahead would be to not be the easy target. And that thinking alone, will influence all of your decision making when determining how to protect your organization from cyber crime. And win.