The Cybercrime the Small Business Needs to Plan For

For the small, but growing business, there are a lot of risks that could potentially harm their ability to stay in business. One of those risks comes in the form of cybercrime. Over the past several years, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have improved the ways in which they combat cybercrime. Let’s take a look at some of the problems SMBs have to deal with.

Compliance Fatigue

With computing being heavily reliant on keeping the right security, compliance fatigue comes in under the radar. This is when a business succumbs to the increasingly growing list of compliances and regulations that they operate under. As more and more standards are outlined for businesses to uphold—without much apparently being done to enforce them—businesses are just more likely to fall victim to complacency.

Obviously, any compliance standards are put in place for good reason, and should be viewed as working to protect the welfare of your business and its customers. Furthermore, there are also concerns around the idea that some businesses operate under several overlapping regulations that demand contradictory actions. This isn’t as prevalent as you may think, but it does happen. Your business having to meet demands of compliance standards is expensive, but probably less expensive than not complying. 

Misconfigured Cloud Environments

Cloud tools have expanded in the past couple of years, and regrettably, this growth far outpaces the workforce that is in demand to maintain these platforms on the business’ side. In fact, Gartner attributes a full 95 percent of public cloud security failures to the customers, not the providers of the platform. Misconfigured cloud solutions can create major security issues, and can result in huge cost overruns and data breaches. 

Mobile Malware

More people use mobile devices today, and as a result, hackers have developed malware that specifically targets mobile platforms. The expansion of FinTech exacerbated these things as a larger number of malware attacks meant to target banking applications have increased substantially in the past two years. That increase has led cybercriminals to shift their focus as their targets have moved more of their computing to their personal mobile devices.

Phishing Attacks

Obviously, we can’t talk about today’s most dangerous cybersecurity issues without mentioning phishing. Phishing is a social engineering tactic that fools people into providing access to scammers. Your employees are essentially the weakest links of your cybersecurity strategy, so ensuring they are properly trained is important.

If you would like to learn more about cybersecurity or how to protect your network and infrastructure against today’s more dangerous online threats, give BNMC a call today at (978) 482-2020.