One of the side effects of success is that you need to worry about security. You see how celebrities have to walk around with bodyguards, their homes have state of the art alarm systems, and the paparazzi is still always looking for a chink in their armor.

The same thing happens online. The more successful you are, the tighter the security of your online assets has to be. (You don't want your competitor ending up with your customer list, do you?)

It is always a good idea to install firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and to have an experienced system administrator or a competent hosting provider that regularly patches your servers with the latest service packs and security updates. Having your site simply defaced is the “best-case scenario” of what could happen when your site's security is breached. It is incredible how hackers break into sites, steal customer information worth thousands of dollars and sell it for a few hundred bucks. Personally, I place decoys in my customer databases so that I can tell when/if this valuable information has been stolen.

Unfortunately there is a type of security attack that is extremely difficult to fight: a distributed denial of service (DDOS). On the up side, you know you are doing really well when hackers try this on you.

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