Cyber Security articles are regularly found on the front page of mainstream news sources nowadays and this is partly due to high profile security breaches. However it should not be overlooked that a large portion of the billions of dollars stolen each year is not from companies making the front page each week. Cyber theft is a widespread problem and anything of value is a target to hackers.
An article appeared on Yahoo News recently which reported ‘$160 billion worth of intellectual property’ is stolen from Western companies each year. A bigger concern is that the budget for I.T security actually dropped by 4% last year.
“A PriceWaterhouseCoopers report found the average information security budget dropped 4 percent to $4.1 million last year, reversing a three-year trend of rising funds to tackle cybercrime.” See full article here
It is important to remember that no matter what level you consider yourself at be it a hobbyist, freelance developer or full-time business person, you should protect the work that is valuable to you. If you are a user of the ionCube PHP Encoder then that means backing up your source code and using up to date security measures to encode and protect your PHP scripts.
