Many small business owners may feel that taking the necessary steps to protect themselves from data breaches and other problems that would otherwise necessitate their having comprehensive tech insurance would be overkill. After all, the attitude of “It couldn’t happen to us,” is often prevalent. However, the fact of the matter is that now businesses of all sizes are being targeted.
Companies might think that their size would make them poor targets for criminals looking to cause a data breach through a hacking scheme, but it’s that kind of feeling of invincibility that might prove to be an enterprise’s undoing, according to a report from Fox Business. The latest trend in hacking attacks isn’t crooks trying to take down big companies with massive stores of consumer or client information, but rather targeting the smallest firms possible as a means of obtaining quick and easy access to smaller amounts of data that goes relatively unprotected.
It’s very difficult for hackers to breach the security systems of major companies because those firms tend to have the resources and interest necessary to make themselves very difficult to attack successfully, the report said. With potentially scores of computer security experts under the employment of big businesses and the latest technological protections at their disposal, hackers may work long and hard only to discover they’re not able to crack a system. On the other hand, small businesses, with few or no IT professionals and relatively little in the way of protective programs, serve as relatively easy targets, which can be compromised with relatively little hard work. The reward might not be as great, but the act of hacking itself will certainly come much easier to these criminals.
One of the biggest problems many small businesses have when dealing with data breaches is that in many cases, they may not even know it’s taken place, the report said. While most larger companies feel confident that they would know relatively quickly that a server, for instance, had been compromised, that may not be true of small businesses, which could go days or even weeks and months without realizing there’d been an intrusion that exposed lots of private and sensitive information on customers or clients.
The real problem
When it comes to attacks like these, many companies may not even think they store information that a criminal could want, the report said. However, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be attacked by hackers attempting to find out whether that’s the case. Even in those incidents, having any amount of information exposed could make companies liable for data breach costs.
“Just because you don’t have any information doesn’t mean your resources aren’t desirable to a hacker,” Dave Chronister, founder of Parameter Security, told the news site. “Keep your systems as secure as possible and understand it’s not a matter of if you will have an outage, but when.”
It is for these reasons that small business owners might want to do more to protect their companies from breaches in and of themselves, as well as the fallout when they occur. Adding small business insurance that specifically insulates them from costs for the latter is often vital to companies staying afloat after suffering such an incident. Data breach remediation costs can stretch into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars very easily, and sometimes rise to even greater heights than that. Obviously, those can sink a small business quickly, and thus having the right kind of protection, in the form of tech insurance, can be necessary to keeping businesses going.
