No. Your Business Is Not Too Small To Get Hacked.

I hear all the time from folks who tell me their business is too small to get hacked. The problem with that is it reflects an outdated assessment of economics and risk. The thinking is that cybercriminals need a big score. And that’s simply not the case.

A while back, the office administrator at one of our clients received an email that appeared to be from one of his employees. It requested the form to change the direct deposit information for the employee’s paycheck. Fortunately, he contacted the employee directly who didn’t know anything about it, stopping the ruse then and there. Had the bad guys been successful and been able to divert the employee’s paycheck, surely the employee would be aware of the problem on payday and reached out to her employer. So the bad guys would have only gotten away with a relatively small sum. But this is the economics of most cybercrime against small businesses. Bad guys aren’t looking for a big score. They’re playing a volume game and targeting thousands of small businesses. They only need a fraction of those to be successful to add up to big money.

The other consideration is risk. Most cyber crooks aren’t spending hours planning a big score, studying properties, bypassing alarms, and risking it all for a single big score. Instead, think of them as walking down the street jiggling the handles of every car door. They don’t care which ones open. 99% of them will be locked. But that 1% that opens - that’s a win for them. Because they know the odds of them being caught are incredibly small.

Cybercriminals don’t need to carefully choose their victims or take big risks. They can just send hundreds of thousands of emails, waiting for the 1% that will click a link, supply credentials, or install their malicious software.

This is why it’s vital to stay vigilant and pay attention to ongoing security training - and report anything that seems phishy.

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