Small Businesses remain in denial about the growing threat of cybersecurity in their daily online interactions. While reports of large corporate security breaches are weekly occurrences, through basic computer security holes, it is not well advertised that small businesses are the biggest targets for these hackers.
The hacking community knows Small Businesses do not take IT Security seriously, because they figure “Why would anybody bother with my little store?” This may be the truth for businesses complete removed from credit card transactions and email, but that is a fraction of the modern business world. Everyone else who owns and operates a small business, should take IT Security upgrades seriously.
A recent article in the New York Times, “Hackers go After Little Fish, Too, While Trawling for Credit Cards“, a United States Secret Service Investigator explains the situation is not just limited to large businesses:
Ari Baranoff, an assistant special agent in charge with the Secret Service’s criminal investigative division, said that for the most part the hackers going after retailers, both large and small, are “Russian-speaking cybercriminals” who are not in the United States.
Mr. Baranoff said that the Secret Service, which oversees the investigation of many point-of-sale attacks, had found that some criminals test out new disruptive malware programs on smaller businesses before unleashing them on bigger companies.
A Verizon Security Report from 2013 noted these accumulated facts about Point of Sale (Point of Sale) software attacks:
– In the Retail, Accommodation and Food Services sector, 97% of attacks involved tampering, generally of payment systems — including payment servers (59%), and payment terminals and pay-at-the-pump devices (47%). Payment terminals at small stores and restaurants are often particularly soft targets.
– In the Healthcare sector, Point-of-sale (POS) systems and desktops were the most commonly breached devices in healthcare organizations – the top targets were POS terminals (70%), POS controllers (41%), Desktops (17%).
– In the Financial Services sector, two-thirds of the breaches that we studied involved ATMs. But ATMs weren’t their only target; attackers cast their nets far and wide. Other assets need protecting too – including database servers and end-users.
In Verizon’s 2015 release of this report, these statistics have only become worse, but now both Small Businesses and Large Enterprise (Chase, Anthem, Home Depot, Target, etc.) businesses are getting much greater numbers of attacks per day.
Small Businesses no longer need to spend large corporate budgets in order to protect against 90% of the daily infections that hackers try to use to gain access into computers. At one time it was on the level of $5000, but today can be obtained for less than $1500.
IF any small business is interested in staying compliant with credit card security (PCI-DSS) and overall backup reliability, call Menlo Technical Consulting today to schedule a review of your Small Business IT Security technologies.