Why Hackers Target Small Businesses

Why is your small business a target for hackers?

When you own a small business, it’s common to talk about growth, marketing plans, and so on. But what too many small business owners tend to ignore is data breaches and the potential of cyber-attacks. Many company owners don’t realize the devestating impact that a cyber attack can have on their company.

87% of small business owners report not feeling at risk from cyber attacks. Many small business owners assume their company is too small to be attacked. After all, what hackers would want to launch attacks on small, locally owned companies? The answer might surprise you.

Small to medium sized companies make excellent targets for many hackers, scammers, and online criminals and there are three main reasons for why this is that we’ll cover in this article.

Three Reasons Hackers Attack Small Business

There are multiple reasons why small businesses are good targets for hackers.

1. As mentioned above, many small business owners don’t believe their businesses are ever going to deal with any hack or attack.

2. General lack of preventative measures in place.

3. Ineffective detection.

These 3 reasons are only the beginning. Usually hackers target a small business because it doesn’t have properly managed IT. A lack of IT support is critical to prevention and your business is severely vulnerable without it It’s essential to have an IT professional who is capable of protecting your business from the dangers lurking in everywhere online.

Hackers know that most business owners don’t believe they are at risk and play on this. Ignorance from business owners on the real risk they face and the resulting lack of prevention makes them easy prey for hackers. They just don’t think hackers will target their small business. Because of that, a company owner will invest way less in added security measures. And unfortunately all these things come with a cost. If you don’t prepare your business for attackers, then the attacks will be significantly more likely. Which is why prevention is key.

Many small businesses don’t understand the basic tools that can be used to protect their company from hackers. Intrusion detection systems, firewalls and even sniffers will help immensely. Antivirus systems, anti-malware support, and host or network based intrusion systems will offer additional assistance to prevent attackers from getting access to your systems. These are all fairly straightforward solutions and it’s alarming how many small and mid-sized companies decide to not put them in place and hackers can see that.

Even when small businesses do know the risk and have the basic IT protection systems in place, small businesses often fail to detect breaches quickly. The more time a breach is open, the more of your private data thieves are able to steal. According to IBM, small businesses take 206 days to detect a breach on average. That’s a disturbing amount of time and that number increases the less robust a company’s IT infrastructure is. This means hackers are incentivised to target companies with poor IT, which unfortunately means small to mid-sized businesses.

Understand the root causes of a breach

If you want to stop a breach, then you need to know what causes it in the first place. It won’t matter if you catch a breach, only to not change what allowed for the breach in the first place.

Targeted criminal attacks are commonly the root cause. However, human negligence or a lack of proper security training can lead people to making all kinds of mistakes that increase your company’s risk. 

To make things even more challenging, there are phishing scams, social engineering, contractors that aren’t trustworthy and breach your trust, SQL or malware injections, and other risks that require a thorough understanding to be properly prepared against.

Proper assessment and understanding are the keys to ensuring even adequate protection against online threats.

Here’s the bad news; 75% of employees surveyed say that they sometimes leave their work stations unsecured. And to make things worse, 29% of employees surveyed don’t even believe investing in cyber security is a priority the company has. According to them an attack isn’t likely. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Is it possible for a data breach to appear in your business? Of course, data breaches can appear in any business regardless of the industry. Company size doesn’t matter. You will find large companies with data breaches but there are reasons many hackers chose to target smaller companies.

What matters for hackers is the information you have and whether that’s valuable or not. If they see that your business has valuable data, they will attack you.

Don’t make the same mistakes that make so many small businesses a target for hackers. Set an industry standard of high quality security measures and protect your company’s data at the same time. 

Tech Masters is a team of IT professionals that know how to protect your business from all kinds of attacks. With over a decade of industry experience, Tech Masters know what steps need to be taken to protect companies like yours. Reach out to us today!