It’s the beginning of the holiday season. The radio stations switched to Christmas carols around Halloween, Santa is ringing a bell over a red bucket on every street corner, and we haven’t even carved the first of the annual pair of turkeys, much less cleared the freezer of last year’s fruitcakes from Aunt Eunice. Our only consolation, apparently, is the conspicuous consumption masking itself as Black Friday.

As an IT professional, you are not immune to the siren song of sales and discounts. You like to put to work a sharpened pencil from your pocket protector as much as the next guy, but that philosophy only applies to hardware, right? The computers and routers and switches, and maybe the licensed software that runs them. Right?

A Sale On Malware

Well, how about a sale on zero-day exploits? How about a catalog of digital intrusion techniques and software targets, complete with prices and reselling agreements? Like a malevolent L.L. Bean with a sale on evil mischief and a mailing list a mile long.

A recent Wired article reveals the secret hacker techniques and price list, so at least the folks in your world will know what they’re up against and how the other side values different levels of penetration and breach. For the record, breaching a WordPress site is worth only about $5,000, but breaching and controlling an iPhone or iPad pays $500,000.

So, now that you know what your network is worth to to others, shouldn’t you rethink what it’s worth to you?

Call ICS today. We might be the best bargain you find this holiday season.