My house is twenty years old next month, and with any time one lives somewhere for two decades there comes the inevitable accumulation of clutter in the basement. 

As with many people, we have that room downstairs where reside archeological grade relics from our days passed. Boxes sit where they were packed a dozen years ago and never since opened. There is a corner devoted to baby and toddler kit that we just couldn’t bear to discard or sell. And of course we saved all those scraps of surplus carpet and boxes of extra laminate flooring and spare ceiling tiles, all from when we renovated and… you never know what you might need later.

The internet as a common public platform for business has been around for longer than twenty years and like my house, some folks have been occupying their digital real estate for decades.

Likewise, I suspect there are a lot of business websites out there with more digital clutter in their metaphorical server basements than most would care to admit. Most of this might be packed tightly away in boxes and spare rooms which will never see the light of day, but unlike my basement it may only take an unscrupulous visitor mere minutes to pack themselves up a copy of all that clutter and disappear into the dark corners of the web.

And I don’t need to tell you that your old business information may be much more valuable on the black market than my box of old charging cables and power adapters. We probably all could spend the weekend doing some spring cleaning.