You’re Not Too Small To Be Hacked

Can your small business afford being hacked? Today, 50 percent of all small businesses have experienced a breach - and 60 percent of victims are out of business within six months due to the hefty cost of recovery. What makes small businesses such an easy target, and what can business owners do to keep their digital doors open? Find out in the latest episode of Decoding Security, as Website Security Research Analysts Jessica Ortega and Michael Veenstra discuss small business cybersecurity, recent security news, and more.

Attackers don't just go after the big guys
You’re Not Too Small To Be Hacked

November 7, 2017 Episode 5

Summary

With the recent large security breaches in the news, it’s easy to think that you’re site isn’t a target, because it’s too small. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Small sites are hacked all the time. Jessica and Michael discuss some of the reasons you need to secure your site, no matter what size it is, and give some suggestions for small businesses.

Recent News

WordPress version 4.8.3 was released this week, containing a critical security release related to the wpdb object used by many plugins. This was not a vulnerability in the core code, but in a contingency used by some plugins.

Google has awarded 3 bug bounties, totalling over $15,000, to a researcher who discovered some security flaws in Google’s incident tracking service. The vulnerabilities allowed the creation of @google.com email addresses, which should only be available to Google employees.

You’re Never Too Small To Be Hacked

60% of small businesses that have been the victim of an attack are out of business within six months of the hack, due to the cost of recovery. The cost to recover is $690,000 on average, for small businesses, and over $1,000,000 for medium sized businesses. There are around 4,000 small business sites attacked per day, according to IBM. Small businesses are targeted because they typically don’t have the infrastructure to be a hardened target.

Cybercriminals are looking for the largest attack surface possible, not necessarily the most data they can breach in the attack. Even if only a small attack is possible, multiply that by the number of small sites the attacker can penetrate, and you’ve got a much larger overall attack.

If you don’t maintain security on your site, it likely already has vulnerabilities, and is likely to have been compromised. According to the 2016 State of SMB Cybersecurity Report, half of the more than 28 million small business in the U.S. have already been compromised.

It is imperative that you invest in cybersecurity for your company, in some form. The worst thing you can do, is nothing at all. Most sites are vulnerable in some way, so you need to leverage cybersecurity to help protect against a possible breach.

Tip of the Day

One of the best ways you can protect your small business is to invest in ongoing employee security awareness.