If it is one area not to cut corners in when budgeting for a business, it is cybersecurity. The risks far outweigh the costs for neglecting to protect any and all information and data. There are several instances of data breaches in large corporations due to lax security protocols. SecureWorld.io hosts a “Top 10 Data Breaches of All Time”, featuring how many people were affected by each incident, what exactly happened, and who was responsible for the damages. The First American Financial Corporation suffered a breach in 2019, affecting 885 million users. The culprit? No authentication procedures. You ever wonder why those tedious reCAPTCHAs ask you to find a certain object in a series of images? This is a measure to discern if you’re human or a bot.
Who can forget the Facebook data breach of 2019, which compromised over 540 million users? Mark Zuckerberg was already getting flack for his company’s questionable practices, from the real-name requirement for signing up for an account to his seeming apathy to the social media site being engineered as a hate-group misinformation mill. In the darker reaches of the web, your information is for sale to advertisers and people seeking to scope out your financial paper-trail in order to steal your money.
One particular heinous business transaction in recent years has been cryptocurrency, specifically NFTs. They are essentially tokens with information stored in them, which are sold for exorbitant prices. The thing with NFTs, however, is that the copyrights are sold with the tokens. That means if you have enough money to buy these useless trinkets, you can (theoretically) make money re-selling them. It’s scalping, except it’s much more idiotic. Instead of buying a scalped PS5 for three times the retail price, you are buying a hypothetical ownership of something that probably won’t be worth anything in a few years. It’s especially trouble that video game companies are hocking these NFTs to players, including children, for more microtransaction purposes.
In conclusion, cybersecurity is good and NFTs are bad, but somehow legal.