How Cyber Crime Affects Small And Medium Sized Businesses

Sometimes, small and medium sized businesses make the mistake of believing that cyber crime is a problem that only big businesses have to worry about. Smaller businesses, they think, aren’t an attractive target for hackers, since they have smaller caches of information that can potentially be stolen.

Unfortunately, this could not be farther from the truth. In 2011, 40% of the cyber attacks that were perpetuated were against small or medium sized businesses. According to Phil Higgins, Vice-President of security science at Stroz Friedberg, “just being connected to the internet makes any company interesting to cyber criminals.”

In fact, some sources like CIO suggest that smaller businesses can be a much more attractive target for hackers simply because they’re not paying attention.

What are Cyber Criminals looking for?

• Data

By far the most common goal of cyber criminals is to accumulate data. Financial information and identifying information of customers, employee lists including sensitive information that can be used for identity theft, or industry sensitive information are all attractive to different cyber criminals or hackers.

• Exploits

Directly stealing data lists is just one way that cyber attacks gather information. Sometimes, rather than a direct attack, hackers look to install malware or trojans that gather information as it accumulates, sending it back to the hacker.

• Disruption

Sometimes, cyber criminals are looking to hold a company hostage by limiting access to their website, causing problems with the intranet in order to make daily operations difficult or impossible, or to essentially hold the company hostage until they pay the hacker to release the company.

There have also been cases where hackers have essentially diverted the processing power of IT servers and computers in order to rent that out to other services.

What do small businesses need to do to combat cybercrime?

With cyber crime on the rise and costing the global economy over $400 billion a year, how do small and medium sized businesses protect themselves and their customers?

Start by acknowledging the problem.

You can’t fix what you pretend doesn’t exist. Unfortunately the cyber crime is one rise and the numbers show that 47% of Americans have been hacked in the past year. You have to start by admitting that your business can be targeted by hackers, and understanding what you can do to combat the problem itself.

Reduce temptation.

The less data you store, the less interesting you are to criminals. People often perceive cloud computing to be less secure than a server stored in your own office, but the truth is that when you use cloud computing systems, your data is stored in huge data banks in secure server rooms with top notch protection. That beats an out of date server with insufficient protections any day. You make yourself less likely to be targeted by hackers simply because you don’t have the information they want.

Train your employees.

Even if you have a dedicated IT department and the absolute highest levels of protection against cyber crime, if your employees follow unsafe practices with emails and mobile devices, your company is increasing its risk dramatically. The human vulnerability is often going to be the one that’s hardest to mitigate. One of the most common methods of attacking companies currently is to send phishing emails to employees and gather their logins so that hackers can directly assault the company itself with the login data.

Consider insurance

Some insurance firms are now offering insurance against a cyber threat. If your company is responsible for a loss of information, this may help to protect you against damages and liabilities.

Why should small businesses be worried?

Because small businesses are often operating with much less capital and on a much smaller stage that multinational corporations, one cyber attack can cause serious problems for a company, or potentially put them out of business. A survey conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance said that 50% of small businesses close within six months of a cyber attack.

Businesses that are attacked face problems like:

• Losing business while key personnel manage the damages from the attack
• Loss of actual funds if a hacker gets access to the business’s financial accounts, and the bank does not cover the losses (not all of them do.)
• Reputation damage. Small businesses live and die based on their customer’s perception of trust with them, and losing customer information can cause irreparable damage to that reputation. In some ways, this might be the hardest effect of a cyber attack for a business to recover from.

If you operate a small or medium sized business that uses the Internet for its daily work, it’s crucial that you are aware of the problems that can result from a cyber attack. Consider preparing for such a situation part of the cost of doing business in the modern era, and work to protect both yourself and your customers.