You might suppose, based on what you read in the news, that cybercrime is something that only large businesses need to worry about. But a closer reading of the data demonstrates that this simply isn’t the case. One survey found that around 41% of small businesses fell victim to an attack in 2023, and the median cost of those attacks was around $8,300.
If you want to avoid these costs, and remain on the right side of the statistics of the future, then you’ll need to worry about cybersecurity.
Understanding the Unique Cyber Risks for Small Businesses
There are a number of reasons that smaller businesses make tempting targets. On the whole, the risks for the hacker tend to be lower, and the likelihood of success tends to be higher. Smaller businesses might be more vulnerable to phishing, ransomware, and insider threats.
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and other technological trends, these attacks are only likely to become more frequent, and more sophisticated. A hack could prevent your business from operating, expose you to legal threats, damage your reputation, or do all of these things at the same time.
Essential Tools and Techniques for Data Breach Prevention
Preventing a breach is often a matter of consistently protecting your endpoints – the points data is being sent from, and to. The right training can make a difference, as can the right spam protection. A policy of using a password manager, protected by multi-factor authentication, might drive down the likelihood of an intruder guessing a password through brute force, and thereby gaining access to your systems, and your data.
Implementing Effective Access Controls and Employee Training
When there are many potential points of entry, life becomes easier for malicious online actors. For this reason, it’s a good idea to restrict access to sensitive parts of your system (or any part of your system) only to people (and systems) who actually need it. This is known as the principle of least privilege. It’s what will prevent your entire network from being compromised when a breach occurs.
Of course, training for employees should also be thorough and regular. The nature of the threat posed by phishing and social engineering is likely to evolve in the future, and proactively getting the message across can help to instil an appropriate level of caution.
Securing Remote Work and the Role of VPNs in Small Business Security
One of the major advantages of the modern digital age is also a potential source of vulnerability. When workers are contributing from remote locations, using mobile devices, it can be difficult to ensure that the connection is secure. A good small business VPN can provide a partial solution, where i
t can encrypt the transmission of data, and integrate seamlessly with your other security measures.
