Small business owners face unique challenges in many areas of their profession. Cybersecurity is no exception. From understanding their risk to finding appropriate resources for mitigating that risk, many small business owners struggle to keep their small enterprise cyber-safe.

There are a lot of factors that influence how you build a cybersecurity budget. Here are a few to consider: Industry and company size Compliance and regulatory mandates Sensitivity of the data you collect, use and share Requests from company stakeholders or customers The actual amount companies spend on cybersecurity is often tied to their IT budget, which helps account for company size and IT infrastructure.

Denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks : A DoS attack is designed to overwhelm a machine or network’s resources so that the intended users cannot access the system. DoS attacks are accomplished by bombarding the specified target with a flood of traffic or information to crash the system. Phishing and spear-phishing attacks : Phishing attacks are a common cyberthreat in which an attacker sends emails that appear to be from trusted sources. The goal is to gain personal information from a wide number of users, such as usernames and passwords, or influence someone to take a specific action, such as download malware onto your machine. Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack : As the name implies, a MitM attack is when an attacker inserts themselves between a user and the services they interact with. There are different types of MitM attacks, namely session hijacking, IP spoofing and replay attacks. As of today, there is no single method to prevent all types of MitM attacks, though encryption and digital certificates are used to help prevent an attacker from inserting themselves between a user and a server. Drive-by download attack : This type of attack is used to spread malware far and wide. An attacker looks for insecure websites to hack and plant malicious code throughout the site. When a user visits one of these hacked websites, they may unintentionally install malicious code or be redirected to a site created by the attacker. Unlike other types of cyber threats, a drive-by download doesn’t require the user to take any action, meaning they don’t have to click a button or open an email to be infected. The best way to prevent this type of attack is to train your staff to keep their internet browsers and operating systems up to date and avoid websites that are not secure. Password attack: Obtaining a user’s password is one of the oldest, most common and effective form of a cyberattack. Passwords can be obtained through many different means, such as watching someone type in their password, searching for unencrypted passwords on a network, using social engineering to reconstruct passwords, or simply guessing a correct password through brute-force or dictionary attacks. To protect your company from password attacks, implement two-factor authentication policies, require your employees to use strong, unique passwords, and implement an account lockout policy that locks user accounts after several invalid password attempts.

Eighty-two percent of small business owners deem their information not important enough to steal and therefore incorrectly assume they are not targets for attacks.For hackers, however, small businesses are often their trojan horse in order to best infiltrate larger businesses. The rate at which cyber attacks against small businesses grew last year is a staggering 424%. This means that small business cyber breaches grew more than 5 times in 2020 when compared to the previous year.