Hacking does seem all the rage at the moment. Last week, almost 5,000 Australian businesses lost their website content completely and permanently when someone hacked the server of their web host. We also recently had the RSA incident, causing the wholesale replacement of RSA tokens, the hacking of PlayStation's database and domain name registry Distribute.IT, the revelation that Dropbox is about as safe as your letterbox, and the massive theft of other people's email addresses from Epsilon.

It is all a little bit scary, we were motivated ourselves to find out what'd happen if our web host went down –imagine having to recreate our awesome website!

But there are seriously existential risks at play –you could lose your website, your customers' personal and credit card information -basically most businesses are at ultimate risk of losing even their whole business if the perfect hacking storm hits.

What can the law do to help? Well, yeah you have avenues of redress. You can always sue someone. You can put indemnities and liability clauses in your service contracts and rest assured that it'll be someone's fault and that they will be held accountable. Maybe the hackers will even get prosecuted, this stuff is a crime for sure. But, honestly, that's all going to be cold comfort when your reputation's been trashed and your customers have all headed for the exits, or your system's been down for a week and nobody can find you online.

Therefore, we say, forget about the law and think about pragmatics. Our four top tips:

  • Redundancy –whatever it is that matters, make sure it's backed up. Website content, databases, server content etc; a recent copy should exist, somewhere where you and your mainframe are not.
  • Basic security –egenforced password changes. There's cooler stuff around too, for example someone's just launched a web portal where you can search databases to see if one of the hacking groups like LulzSec has stolen your staffs' email addresses.
  • Disaster recovery –have a plan for what happens when the world comes down around your ears, metaphorically or literally.
  • Insurance –all these risks are insurable, so insure them.

None of that creates work for lawyers, so it must be good advice!

With our compliments

We do not disclaim anything about this article. We're quite proud of it really.