Why A Small Business Sees More Cyberattacks Than Bigger Ones

Small businesses are easy targets for cybercriminals. This is because, most of the time, small businesses are unaware of cybersecurity precautions. A new report shows that smaller firms are three times more likely to be attacked than big businesses. According to the report, thousands of emails were analyzed, and it was discovered that a small business with fewer employees would encounter 350% more social engineering attacks compared to larger organizations. 

Small and medium-sized businesses are the prime targets because they often do not have the required resources to protect themselves against malicious attacks and exposure to malware. 

In a survey conducted by Singapore Business Federation, 60% of the cyberattacks were on small businesses. In these attacks, the most prevalent were Business email scams and ransomware. These two different types of cyberattacks did not only result in financial losses but also affected employee productivity and efficiency.

This article lists some reasons small businesses are more attacked than bigger ones and how to prevent it.

Why Are Small Businesses Targeted So Often?

Lack of Employee Training

Cybercriminals know that many small business employees are less attentive to cybersecurity measures. These criminals lurk around, waiting for an employee to make a mistake. 

Mistakes happen often due to the fact that employees are less aware of the importance of cybersecurity. Surprisingly, many employers of small companies do not invest in security training for their staff. 

Many small business owners do not know about the latest phishing scams, and even the few informed ones may not be able to afford the cost of the training, which increases their vulnerability. 

An excellent way to protect small businesses is to ensure that the employees are trained to identify possible threats and ways to avoid them. Training doesn’t have to be expensive, and it’s much cheaper than the cost of a data breach.

Little or No IT Support

Many times those running small businesses are constantly carrying out multiple tasks simultaneously. Cybercriminals are overtly savvy. They understand that small businesses do not often have good IT infrastructure, nor the time to address it. They identify loopholes and feed on them. 

This is typical when the small business is just getting started and seeking ways to expand. While it is not bad for employees or employers to multitask, IT is not a task that you want a novice or the employee that’s “good with computers” handling.

The threats in the IT environment are complicated, and defending them will require an individual or team that can protect your network devices and ensure they are not vulnerable to any form of attacks. Unfortunately, a lot of smaller companies think that they can just skirt by without investing in monthly managed IT support and monitoring.

They Are a Gateway to Bigger Organizations

Although small businesses often consider themselves unimportant, making them sometimes lackadaisical about their security structure, they are the perfect way for cybercriminals to penetrate larger organizations. 

This happens because larger organizations often contract some of their services to smaller organizations. When larger businesses employ small ones to take care of their human resource solutions, marketing, or other services, they become electronically connected to the IT systems of these corporations. 

As such, this increases the chances of cybercriminals attacking small businesses. For this reason, this makes small businesses an ideal entry point for cybercriminals. 

Exposure to Malware

Smaller businesses can be more exposed to malware as compared to bigger ones. Since many companies are using e-commerce to digitize their business, small businesses are also participating in this development. 

Small business owners feel at ease using phones to carry out business transactions because they can easily access them. Unfortunately, they depend on their phones to conduct e-commerce, whether it entails sending emails or completing online transactions. These careless activities expose them to malware.

Downloading malware that may disguise as unsuspecting emails and apps also introduces harm to the system. 

Not Properly Securing Employees Working Remotely

Like many other companies, small businesses will often have employees working from home remotely. But they often lack security policies that govern how devices and data should be secured or the apps their remote employees are allowed to use with company data.

Employees can also easily connect to an unsecured network from public places or use public stations to charge phones. This way, any hacker connected to the unsecured network can easily access and manipulate the company’s data.

Protect Your Small Business from Cybersecurity Attacks

Cybercriminals are continuously looking for ways to get a company’s data, and small businesses are at greater risk of being exploited because of the absence of an efficient IT infrastructure. 

Your business can only be protected when you are proactive and follow effective cybersecurity procedures. 

Need help implementing affordable cybersecurity measures for your business? Contact us at (920) 256 -1214 to learn more.