One of the biggest myths about cybersecurity and cybercrime is that smaller businesses are somehow immune to the more dangerous types of threats because they don’t pose a viable target for cybercriminals.

Nothing is further from the truth.

Small businesses are the perfect target for cybercriminals.

Cybercrime covers a wide range of threats and actions, but in the grand scheme of things, you can look at it as a numbers game.

Yes, there are threat actors out there who specifically hold a grudge against a target, and you have state-funded operations that are designed to cause havoc to critical infrastructure. There are even cases of former employees just trying to get retribution or revenge against their past employer. We read cases like this in the news all the time, but the vast majority of cyberthreats are built and designed to target broad audiences to get as much return as possible.

The truth is that 46% of all cyber breaches impact businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees.

Small businesses receive the highest rate of targeted malicious emails at one in about 300.

The employees in a small business experience almost 350% more social engineering attempts than those at larger businesses.

Small business owners often wonder what they have that’s so valuable to cybercriminals, and there are two answers to that: data, and money.

No, you probably don’t have several million contacts in your database, and you probably don’t have several million dollars sitting around to pay a ransom, but you likely have a decent cache of customer and employee data that is worth something on the dark web. More than likely, you’d also pay a hefty amount of money if it meant bringing your business back to normality if hit with ransomware.

This is what the bad guys are banking on, and it’s been successful for them.

Hopefully, this has made it abundantly clear how all small businesses (yes, including yours) need to do everything in their power to protect themselves against every cyberthreat out there. Fortunately, the companies of Northern Virginia have a potential ally in First Column IT. 

We can do a lot to help you stay out of a cybercriminal's crosshairs. The first step: a consultation with us. Give us a call at (571) 470-5594 to get one on the books, or to learn more about how we can help.

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