3. Other people

Although employees are the most likely to be the ones who cause damage or loss to data, a business has to be mindful about the risks from other people outside the business.

Hackers

A hacker is a person who breaks codes and passwords to gain unauthorised entry to computer systems.

Many hackers often don't intend to cause damage to data, but just enjoy the challenge of breaking into a system.

However, in some instances the hacker's purpose could be to commit fraud, to steal commercially valuable data and sell it to another company or to damage or delete the data in order to harm the company. 

Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that is designed to copy itself repeatedly and attach itself to other computer programs.

In the early days of personal computing (1980's) some of the people who created them did it as a 'joke'. For example, there was a virus that caused all the characters on screen to drop into a heap at the bottom of the display. Very annoying, but relatively harmless.

However, quite soon some really nasty versions came out that were deliberately designed to corrupt and delete your files as well as trying to copy itself everywhere.

Viruses can cause an immense amount of time wasting and financial loss for people and businesses.

Malware

This is software that has been deliberately designed to cause harm of some kind. For example it could have been programmed to upload all the data from a system and then delete or encrypt it. There are many other variations of this.

A common source of malware and viruses are email attachments that look harmless or links to innocent looking sites. So be very careful how you deal with email links and attachments.