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Data Breaches: They CAN Happen to Your Small Business

Is your business secure enough? According to Steven Musil, tech writer on CNET, hacks on businesses and government agencies ran rampant in 2014. There were more than “1,500 data breaches worldwide last year” this was about a “50% increase from 2013”.

Top companies were breached—Home Depot, Target, JPMorgan Chase, and Dairy Queen just to name a few. Hackers stole everything from credit card numbers, names, emails, passwords, and Social Security numbers. How did this happen? Hackers have become highly skilled, well-funded professionals.

These top companies that were hacked spent millions and millions of dollars cleaning up the aftermath, paying lawsuits, beefing up security, trying to rebuild trust with consumers. Could your company afford that?
Often times small business owners tell us “well I am just a one man show, why would someone want to steal my data? No one is going to come after me”.

According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, “one in five small businesses falls victim to cybercrime each year. And of those, some 60 percent go out of business within six months after an attack”. Hackers don’t discriminate by company size, industry, clients—they all look for the most important thing—vulnerability.

“Most small business owners still don’t get security, don’t think it’s an issue, and are pretty defenseless,” says Neal O’Farrel of Think Security First. “They assume hackers would need to pick their business out of 27 million others, not realizing that the attacks are automated and focused on discovering vulnerabilities.”
So, back to the question, why do hackers go after small businesses? Small companies are often easy targets leaving much of their data wide open. They also don’t have the funds to fight back like the before mentioned corporations.

How do these attacks happen? Often times hackers find a vulnerability in the businesses systems but attacks can also happen due other weaknesses caused by malware such as a phishing scam, virus, trojan horse, ransomware, adware, spyware, or other malicious program.

In addition, companies who depend on mobile devices put themselves at an even larger risk. According to eVoice’s 2013 “Device Vice” Survey Data:

  • 36% of small business professionals use three or more mobile devices to run their business. Each of those is a point of risk, not only for loss or theft, but also for an attack.
  • 32% give their mobile number out to customers, 19% give it out to parnters or investors, and 18% give it to vendors. That means your contact list, call log, and voicemail contain valuable information about your
  • 35% of small business professionals text every day for business. No longer just for chit chat with friends, your text messages now expose business information too.

 

Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to attacks because many owners believe they don’t have the time and money to invest in software programs or consulting services to make systems more secure. So as a business owner you need to ask yourself, if you don’t have the time and money to protect yourself, how are you going to afford a data breach?

We here at PowerTech Services can help you with your security, virus removal and more. We provide malware protection, anti-spam, content filtering, anti-virus, firewalls, Cloud backups and more. If you need more information on how to protect your company’s data or about any of our services please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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