Not all hacking attempts originate from the outside. If you work in, or own a larger company with scores, or hundreds of employees (or more), then there is a real danger of a hacking attempt originating from inside your company itself.

Statistics where hacking is concerned are hard to come by for a couple of reasons. First, most companies don’t like to admit that they have been hacked. Such an admission can lead to public backlash and loss of trust among a company’s customer base, so usually, only the very highest profile cases make the news.

If your company successfully warded off a hacking attempt, give yourself a well deserved pat on the back. Many companies are not so lucky. Every day, scores of companies are damaged by successful breeches of their security systems by hackers, who seem to work tirelessly to cause damage to business systems around the world.

When you hire an independent security consulting firm to test your company’s defenses, one of the more common tests to have performed is a “Black Box text.” In cases like these, you do not tell the security consultant anything about your company’s network. You don’t give him anything to work with at all. From his perspective, your company is the proverbial “black box, ” and his goal is to initiate a mock attack against your system’s defenses to try and gain access.

Whether you’re in business for yourself, or you work for a large entity that you have no ownership in, if you’re in any way connected to IT, then you should be thinking about network security, because protecting a company’s data is a team effort. It cannot be done in a vacuum, and it can’t be done by just one person.