Cybersecurity for Small Business

Cyber security costs Australian businesses $1 billion a year and, according to the Australian Government, almost half of all targeted attacks struck small and medium businesses. 

“Businesses often find it hard to recover after a cybersecurity incident. When small businesses experience a significant cyber breach, 60 per cent will go out of business within six months," says Angus Taylor MP, Australian Minister for Law Enforcement and Cyber Security.

From hairdressers to builders, restaurants to car dealers, accountants to GPs, small businesses are increasing relying on IT to improve, expand and market their services by using internet-facing technologies such as appointment/booking services, online payments, websites and customer databases. 

When it comes to cyber security, your business is never too small to be targeted by hackers. In reality, small businesses, including family enterprises and startups are more appealing targets as they tend to have less defense and detection capability while sporting a lot of false sense of security.

Common weaknesses arise from complacent attitude, no investment or dedicated IT resources, staff unawareness, out-of-date software, no back-ups/monitoring, and obvious weak link between devices for personal and business use (staff connecting their personal devices to the company network or taking home their company devices).

From a hacker's perspective, such small businesses are more worth time and effort than banks or large corporations. For example, often a single password containing your postcode/date of birth is all that stands in between a hacker and all your protected data. 

Furthermore, small businesses are more likely to pay a ransom, more likely to be used as a gate to access other partner businesses, more likely to store sensitive data unencrypted, and are a lot easier to get away with after the hacking (due to no comprehensive audit logging for forensic analysis/evidence).

Under the new mandatory data breach reporting amendments to the Privacy Act, businesses of any size in Australia need to maintain basic cyber hygiene as they are now required to disclose any breach that involves personal customer data. 

Here at Cyberflare, we recommend cyber resilience for all businesses irrespective of size.

Many full-scale penetration testing and vulnerability assessment services in the market are prohibitively expensive and not really suitable/necessary for small businesses.

We provide affordable vulnerability management, cybersecurity testing, remediation and cyber resilience building services tailored for small businesses. 

These services are in addition to our full-spectrum managed services, including secure website development, maintenance, proactive monitoring/scanning, managed infrastructure services such as cloud/dedicated server management, big data, AI and automation.