Key Takeaways:
- The duo know it takes more than passion and business smarts to stop cyber criminals taking the shine off their beauty brand.
- It's important to use multi-factor authentication, and different passwords for various systems.
- I always tell my two kids and my husband Adam to really look into an email to figure out if it’s true or a scam.
When Glitter Girl founder Sophia Rizzo appeared on the TV show Shark Tank at 16, it was a stark reminder of the risks of cyber crime.
But it wasn’t because the TV exposure led to an attack. Quite the opposite.
Rather, the sudden surge of traffic to the beauty brand’s website in 2024 caused it to crash.
The Gold Coast-based business, run by Sophia and her mum Megan, typically received 200-300 daily visits to its site, but that rocketed to 2,500 concurrent users when the show aired.
“There were so many people on the website that I thought it was under attack and shut itself down,” recounts Megan, the director of Glitter Girl.
“All sales stopped, all business stopped. We were up until 3am trying to get the website back online.”
While they finally restored the site, Megan says “the damage had been done”.
She pegs the financial cost of lost sales as in the “tens of thousands of dollars,” a significant hit for the growing family business.
Glitter Girl was launched by Sophia when she was just 10, after selling pots of glitter to her friends at school. It became such a success that Megan quit her photography business to work full-time for the brand, which cracked $1.2 million in sales before Sophia turned 16.
But the duo know it takes more than passion and business smarts to stop cyber criminals taking the shine off their beauty brand.
Megan says the website incident was a wake-up call to just how devastating a cyber attack could be.
“It is a big concern, it gave us a glimpse into what could happen if we ever fell victim to an incident," she says.
“Like any small business, the potential for our data to be compromised is another big concern. If we had to start from scratch, it would be so much work.”
She says the online business employs robust cyber security measures, including the basic but important use of multi-factor authentication, and different passwords for various systems.
While acknowledging the frustration these can sometimes cause, Megan firmly believes: “It’s something that you need to do to keep your information safe.”
An early career in banking and finance also provided a foundational awareness for the threats posed by scammers, with many customers sharing their stories of woe.
“It’s something I’ve instilled in my family members,” she says.
“They are so clever, but I always tell my two kids and my husband Adam to really look into an email to figure out if it’s true or a scam. It’s the same with the text messages."
She undertook further education through the Cyber Wardens course, which provided a valuable reminder of the need to remain vigilant.
“Day to day, you’re so entrenched in your business and your brand,”she says. “It really brought to the top of mind that this is something that we need always to be thinking about and staying on top of.”
