Small Business and Internet Security 

 

Any online business will always be at the risk of cyber attacks. People who carry out such attacks are known as cyber criminals or hackers. 

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There are thousands of hackers out there who seek to hack into online companies, websites, blogs and emails. Ever wondered what their motives are? What really are they looking for? And what do they gain by invading your privacy?

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Well, here we are going to look at the basics of what cyber criminals are after, and give you an insight on how they succeed in hacking.

What Cyber Criminals Are After
Hackers look for information on your business and client details. Whichever way you keep this information online, whether on servers, stored in emails, or archived on your employees desktops hackers will find a way of getting access to that information.

What Information Are Cyber Criminals Targeting
Cyber criminals will always come after information that is important to them and their plans. They will infiltrate your systems, hack into your mails, go through your serves, and cyber stalk your activities online so that they can get what they are looking for.

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Most common information that cyber criminals target include:

- Customer records (contact information, transactions made, bank accounts and passwords)
- Employee information
- The Company’s bank transactions
- Contact lists
- Credit card numbers

 

In other cases, hackers will look to flood your system, spread viruses or even wipe out your entire database.

How Small Businesses are Targeted

Small businesses are easy targets for hackers. This is because a lot of small online companies have not really invested in extensive online security and they mostly run on basic privacy and security reserved by their webmasters and internet providers.

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Due to this fact, cyber criminals have developed numerous ways of exploiting small online businesses. They send email scams which when opened, generates malware which in turn gathers sensitive information.

Studies show that the most common attacks to small business online include:

- Viruses, Worms and Trojans which is rated at 100% being the usual case to business.
- 96% of online businesses have reported cases of Malware
- 86% of the companies have been hit by Botnets
- Web-based attacks is at 64%
- 44% of the companies in the study have reported their devices stolen.

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This includes computers, hard drives and servers.
- Malicious code have been used in 30% of the companies
- Phishing & Social engineering has also been mentioned by 30% of the companies.
- And finally 4% of the companies experienced denial of service.

This study shows that almost all small businesses have to deal with the threats of viruses, Trojans and worms and to some extent, malware. Virus attack is a threat to all companies whether large or small.

There are fewer cases where cyber criminals use web-based attacks, phishing and social engineering or theft of devices. This is so probably because of the attention and risk involved. It is important to increase awareness of security in small businesses. This can be done through education of employees on cyber security and proper measures to take when dealing with malicious threats.