Digital Marketers Need to Have an Eye on Cyber Security

What good is a website that is constantly having outages? How useful is a hijacked social media account publishing questionable offers? What about an email marketing platform loaded with stolen email addresses blasting out SPAM?  Digital marketing channels infected with malware or compromised in some way not only undermine the time, energy, and money invested in that campaign, but it can also cause lasting damage to your company’s reputation.

Cyber security is a fast paced and technically complex topic.  Digital marketers will have a difficult time being experts on all the nuances involved.  However, they can be a first line of defense by proactively recognizing signs of trouble and raising a warning.

Diligence is key to preventing the worst aspects of a security breach in your digital marketing. Here are two examples of how we’ve correctly and incorrectly approached security breaches in digital marketing.

Diligent Behavior

Several years ago a client’s email marketing account more than doubled its contact list overnight. While they regularly added contacts, it was an uncommonly large import so we reviewed the contact information and found only email addresses with no contact info.  It was also uncommon for contacts to be added without at least a name in addition to the email address.

While we contacted the client to see if the names were legitimate, we also requested that the email platform put a hold on any scheduled emails until we verified the contacts.  It turned out that the account had been compromised from an employee traveling internationally and several SPAM emails were already loaded to be sent to the list from that account.  Thankfully we were able to re-secure the site and remove the contacts before any communications were delivered.

Lack of Diligent Behavior

Recently our site experienced several outages.  We investigated the problem, repaired it, and did some basic security steps like password resets. But we were not as diligent as we should have been.  After the third outage within a month and speaking with our web host on the technical details, we realized that there must be a malware infection.  That’s when we got fully committed to resolving the issue with a fresh installation of wordfence to review our WordPress site.

Wordfence found several compromised files and was able to remove those.  Thankfully that stabilized the site and we’ve had no recurrences of the problem.  Our issue was simple enough that it didn’t require a more in-depth or expensive repair process. However, our lack of diligence on our own site unnecessarily led to additional outages.

Cybersecurity isn’t often top of mind in digital marketing like anti-virus programs for computers or mobile devices. But servers and digital marketing accounts can be compromised just like any personal device.  Security plugins like wordfence, list reviews on email marketing platforms, and password management applications are valuable tools to prevent security breaches but they aren’t fool proof.  It’s important for digital marketers to keep an eye out for vulnerabilities. More importantly digital marketers need to raise a warning to any suspicious activity and be diligent in quickly and thoroughly resolving the problem so that it doesn’t undermine their marketing gains.