"It's all over!"

That’s the worst thing you can hear in a golf club’s office. Golf course management does, of course, focus on perfect fairways, greens, sporting challenges, good catering and a wide range of services related to the game of golf. Unfortunately, the necessary background infrastructure (servers, firewalls, IT expertise) is often somewhat neglected – and so you still find computers running the long-discontinued Windows 10 in the offices of some golf clubs. However, when the worst comes to the worst, it is a carefully planned and up-to-date contingency plan that determines whether a golf club remains operational.

Axel Heck, Managing Director of PC CADDIE://online, has known for decades: “A successful cyberattack no longer affects just computers. It disrupts golf operations. It paralyses tee times, encrypts members’ data, interrupts payment processes and damages the trust of members and guests. What has been built up over years can suffer considerable financial damage within a matter of hours. The loss of data is often just the beginning; far more serious is the loss of reputation. And reputation cannot simply be restored from a backup.”

Axel Heck continues: “Cyber security is therefore no longer a minor technical issue. It is part of responsible corporate governance in the golf market. Even a few simple preventative measures can be highly effective. Greater scepticism towards incoming emails, restricting access rights, or providing regular IT training for staff fundamentally enhances security. To be prepared in an emergency, it is particularly important to simulate a data loss or cyber-attack. Does the data backup – and, above all, the recovery process – work? Does every employee know the necessary escalation procedures and, where applicable, the legal requirements to ensure compliance with statutory reporting deadlines in the event of data protection incidents?

Should a cyber-attack involving ‘ransom’ demands then occur, one must weigh up whether the sum is worth it. “Without a functioning data backup system, the only option is to start from scratch – and unfortunately, this happens time and again to golf courses every year,” says Axel Heck. In practice, he has already seen that even the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), when called in, can only shrug its shoulders. “The dark web isn’t called that for no reason,” says Axel Heck, adding: “For years, we’ve been providing PC CADDIE customers with specialised tools to protect themselves against digital theft and IT blackmail. Nevertheless, even trained staff and a healthy dose of scepticism towards strange enquiries, emails or text messages remain a good defence against the now numerous attacks across all communication channels. One important piece of advice to conclude: cyber insurance is generally helpful – but even that only pays out if all standard security measures were in place. And even then: if all the data is gone, even money from an insurance policy can hardly restore a company’s reputation: what’s gone is gone!”