This week did not start like a normal week at the office.
I heard about a business dealing with malware on their site. Email was not going to cut it. So Kyle Bloor and I got in the car and drove two hours from Chester to Birmingham, straight to the Homebuilding and Renovating Show at the NEC, to sit down with the owner and deal with it.
Security Is Not a Tech Problem
People file malware under IT and then wonder why it does not get urgent attention. It is not an IT problem. It destroys sales, it damages the reputation you spent years building, and it puts customer data at risk. Those are business problems that happen to have a technical cause.
The reason I would not handle it over email is that email lets everyone stay calm about something that is not calm. When the store is compromised, the merchant needs to understand the situation properly, in one conversation, from someone who is not hedging.
I have written about how often this goes the other way, where nobody inside the business wants to hear that the store is hacked, and about the daily monitoring that catches this before a customer does.
The Trip Turned Into Something Else
What started as an emergency became a good day. We met people, saw businesses doing interesting things, and had real conversations about ecommerce and growth rather than the polite version you get on a call.
That happens a lot. Showing up in person keeps paying us back in ways that were never the reason for the trip.
The Uncomfortable Question
When was the last time anyone actually reviewed your site security? If the honest answer is that you cannot remember, that is your answer.
Get someone to look. It costs very little to check and a great deal to find out late.