Should SMBs Worry About Hackers?

An interview with Sam Glines, CEO of NorseCorp

1.  Should SMBs be worried about targeted attacks by hackers and cybercriminals?

Getting hacked isn’t something that keeps most website owners—the majority of whom are small and medium business owners—awake at night. What we need to understand is that today’s hackers do not discriminate by size, revenue, or type of site they attack. A hacker will certainly prize a larger site over a smaller one when it comes to a potential target, but gaining access to a site is not always the end goal. Often the goal is hijacking the bandwidth or servers of a company and marshaling those assets in a DDos attack on other targets. We have seen instances where a small, local law firm’s website was used as a bot in an attack on a large national bank.

2.  Why do most small businesses have the mentality that they won’t get hacked?

“Why would anyone want to hack MY website?” is the most common mentality we see. For most, cyber-attacks are the concern of major corporations. Essentially, businesses are missing a global perspective on all the malicious bots and attacks happening around the world and their origin. From DVRs, smart TVs to old laptops there are many devices out there within these businesses' walls that are vulnerable to attack or spreading malware unknowingly from the owner's network.

3.  How should SMBs protect themselves today vs. five years ago? 

Ten years ago hackers chose a target site, studied it to discover its vulnerabilities, potentially developed exploit code to test multiple attack scenarios, and then tried to compromise and take over control of the server. It was also very popular to develop a computer virus to spreads across the Internet essentially clogging corporate email systems.

The biggest shift in Internet security is the surge in cybercrime and malicious hacking from automated hacking programs and botnets. Today, ever-improving tools and cheap computing power, and virtualized servers have allowed hackers and cybercriminals to change their game. A hacker can now automate an attack, simultaneously probing, attacking and compromising thousands of sites around the world, and launch it from an unsuspecting user or organization’s computer.

Conventional security solutions are reactive, using static and mostly out-of-date data. Despite a plethora of available security solutions, hackers always seem to be one step ahead forcing users into a never-ending cycle of patching and updating catch-up. To the average user, these bots are mostly invisible and victims usually don’t learn of an attack until the damage is done. The key to modern-day cyber security is live threat intelligence that can identify threats on the Internet live and prevent security breaches before they occur.

See the full post here on Why SMBs Are Easy Targets, But Don't Know It