Is Your Mentality Playing into the Hands of Hackers?

This, unfortunately, is a cybercriminal’s dream—after all, would you rather take $100 from a wallet you found on the ground or rob a bank?

Yes, the gains from completing the latter would be much greater, but think of all the effort that goes into planning and executing it. Dozens of hours of surveillance, intense research on the movement, security system, and processes that go into protecting the money. Add to this the time spent building a team and planning every single action down to the smallest detail and still being likely to fail and the wallet might seem a bit more plausible.

Worse yet, with the number of midmarket businesses ignoring their security posture, most cybercriminals find themselves tripping over these hypothetical wallets. After all, they can spend an afternoon of work on your business or months of work to breach something bigger.

If you think you’re too small to be targeted, think again. Here’s why.

No One is Too Small to Be Targeted

The statistics show that no business is too small to be targeted by a cyberattack. SMBs are softer targets than enterprises in many ways, as they usually have fewer IT resources, less sophisticated cybersecurity defenses, and are more inclined to pay ransoms because they simply can’t afford the downtime.

From ransomware payments to intellectual property lost to the damaged reputation that goes into notifying your customers of a data breach, the fallout from an attack is much more likely to derail your business than it is an enterprise. After all, they’re not simply dropping money into the prevention side of the equation, they’re putting immense effort into detecting, recovering, and repairing their reputation.

On the other hand, small and midsized businesses who ignore prevention due to costs are just as unlikely to invest in backups, recovery, damage control, and the like.

Advances in Cybersecurity Make It Easier for Hackers to Gain Access

As global enterprises fight the battle against cybercriminals every day, small-time criminals are benefitting from trickle-down hackonomics. Big time hackers aren’t only going to attack big time targets—there’s also good profit in selling the exploits. This leaves small time crooks with access to sophisticated technologies that small businesses are unable to fight off.

In fact, 2020 had created a significant market for “ransomware-as-a-service,” in which hackers would sell off their failed strains to lesser-known actors, allowing them to rebuild completely new ransomware variants. Now, this has resulted in enterprise-level ransomware for criminals targeting small and midsized companies, able to exploit data or cripple companies with less work than ever.

Rethinking Your Security Presence

As companies continue to readjust business models and access, the threats will continue. Cybercriminals continue to adapt their actions to keep in step and select the quickest and easiest path to their victims.

From prevention to backup, the cost of securing your applications, communications, networks, and data is a drop in the bucket compared to the fallout that comes after a breach. If you’re cutting corners on security, assuming that hackers have higher-value targets, you’re not much different than our hypothetical wallet dropper highlighted earlier.

Regardless of what the infrastructure looks like – Cloud, on-premise, or a hybrid, having the right security posture will help you to avoid any of this fallout by securing the connections between multiple sites, ultimately keeping your users, customers, applications, and data safe.

At Virtually Managed IT Solutions LLC, we’re here to help. From network security to application and cloud security, our team will work to protect you and keep you from becoming another statistic. Get to know more about our security solutions, our network of esteemed partners, and contact us to learn more.

Additional Cybersecurity Resources

Experian® 2021 Data Breach Industry Forecast2021 Resolution – Security, Not Just Compliance