SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK a Guide to Understanding Your Risks and Protecting Your Future
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SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK A guide to understanding your risks and protecting your future. SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK INTRODUCTION: TARGETING SMALL BUSINESS No matter what size your business, you can’t risks you face and the solutions available to About 55% of small and medium business ignore cybercrime. You can’t ignore hackers defend your data. (SMBs) participating in the Ponemon and the increasingly sophisticated malware Institute’s 2016 State of Cybersecurity Hackers never give up looking for they are continually unleashing on the in Small and Medium-Sized Business undiscovered vulnerabilities and keep internet. You can’t be complacent and think study said their companies had suffered conjuring new, creative ways to break you’re not a target. Everyone is a target. a cyberattack and 50% reported “they into networks. No business is immune. had data breaches involving customer Too many small businesses still believe that And any belief that you are not a target and employee information in the past 12 their data has no value. That they are too may very well have severe consequences, months.” Only 14% of participants rated small for cybercriminals to bother targeting such as compromising employee and as highly effective their “ability to mitigate them. The harsh reality is that your data is customer data; losing intellectual property cyber risks, vulnerabilities and attacks.” valuable. Cybercriminals who successfully and crushing your competitiveness in steal personally identifiable information, the market; suffering a data breach that Even if cybercriminals aren’t necessarily medical records and trade secrets sell them destroys your reputation; incurring penalties interested in your company’s data, for a tidy profit every day. for non-compliance with federal and state they often try to use small businesses regulators; insurmountable remediation as unwitting pawns to breach larger If you handle sensitive data such as costs; losing customers and partners… The organizations. That’s what happened in Social Security numbers and credit card list goes on, but the point is clear; data the 2013 cyberattack on retail giant Target, information or have any intellectual property breaches can be devastating to a small which exposed credit card and personal you want to ensure doesn’t fall into the business. data of more than 110 million consumers. wrong hands, you need to understand the Hackers reportedly broke into the company’s VIPREANTIVIRUS.COM 2 SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK network after stealing the credentials of Other threats for which you need defenses some of the common mistakes users make a company that provides heating and air – and which are discussed more in- that can create cyber risks for your business. conditioning services to Target. depth in this guide – include web-based The sad reality of doing business in a threats, such as clickjacking and drive-by modern, connected world is there is Investigators believe the Target attack downloads, and exploit kits. started with a phishing email sent to Fazio no shortage of cyber risks. The cost of Mechanical Services, the HVAC company, Included in this guide is a discussion on cybercrime keeps rising, and is projected which according to owner Ron Fazio had a how to implement BYOD (bring your own to reach $2 trillion by 2019. A cyberattack data connection with Target for electronic device) policies to avoid creating new costs companies an average of $4 million. billing, contract submission and project vulnerabilities by letting employees connect These are scary numbers, but you are not management. their own smartphones, tablets and laptops completely defenseless against cyber risks. to the network. We also share security best That’s what we intend to show you in the Phishing has become a favorite cyberattack practices for SMB companies, and address following pages. method. It’s easy and inexpensive for attackers and often succeeds because it preys on users’ trust and curiosity. It also plays a major role in ransomware infections: 93% of phishing emails currently contain ransomware, according to researchers. Phishing and ransomware are just two examples of cyber threats against which SMB companies need to defend. Phishing and ransomware have received a lot of focus in the last couple of years because of their prevalence, but cyber threats are numerous and varied – and you need to deploy systems, implement policies and educate users to combat them all. VIPREANTIVIRUS.COM 3 SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PHISHING Phishing vexes a lot of organizations because you can’t Fraudsters have no shortage of material for bait. A solve the problem by just throwing technology at it. phishing email may pass itself off as an Apple Store Preventing phishing attacks requires a combination of message, a message from a Facebook friend, a package robust email security and user training. delivery notification, a resume from a job applicant or myriad other disguises. The victim clicks on an The human factor is the tough part. Even when attachment that proceeds to download malicious code users understand the risks of clicking on suspicious onto their machine, potentially infecting the whole attachments or URLs, some still do it. In a recent study, network, or visits a website that asks for private data, about half of the subjects in an experiment clicked on which the user provides thinking it’s a legitimate request. links from strangers in e-mails and Facebook messages – even though most of them claimed to be aware of the Three Phishing Approaches risks. Phishing currently breaks down into three main It really takes a sustained effort to educate users to stop categories. Regular phishing casts a wide net, with doing what they intuitively know they shouldn’t do but cybercriminals sending emails to large groups in an do it anyway. attempt to ensnare as many victims as possible. And that’s one of the reasons phishing is so successful. A second, more refined approach – spear phishing – Rather than trying to hack into secured systems, targets specific groups or individuals. Spear phishing cybercriminals sneak into the path of least resistance by usually consists of attempts to steal private information tricking distracted or trusting users into opening the door such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and for them. financial account information. VIPREANTIVIRUS.COM 4 SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK This technique is, by far, the most successful on the internet today, accounting Secure Your #1 Threat Vector for greater than 90% of attacks. Spear phishers gather personal information The biggest security vulnerability within any about victims from social media and other sources to use in bait emails to organization is its employees, and they are more increase the chances users will believe them. often targeted through email than any other threat A third technique, called whaling, focuses on bigger targets, such as C-level vector. Deploy the protection you need with best- executives, politicians and celebrities. “Whaling emails and websites are highly in-class email security that doesn’t slow you down. customized and personalized, often incorporating the target’s name, job title VIPRE Email Security for Exchange is an advanced, or other relevant information gleaned from a variety of sources,” according to powerful, policy-based email security solution that TechTarget. defends networks against spam, phishing, viruses and other security threats transmitted via email. Protect Yourself VIPRE Email Security for Exchange enables you to: To prevent phishing attacks, you need to train users to identify and avoid • Help prevent malware infections – including phishing emails. Beyond that, you need email security with advanced features ransomware – targeting users via email designed specifically to combat this threat. • Improve the performance and reliability of Such features include a sender policy framework, which checks if incoming Microsoft® Exchange servers by eliminating spam email was sent by authorized hosts; auto-whitelisting, which automatically • Cut expenses by reducing the time and adds and removes listings based on preset criteria; and a regularly updated complexity of managing email security issues spam filter that recognizes and sifts out potential phishes. • Enforce stronger malware defense with a Phishing is the most successful attack vector used by cybercriminals and the policy-based email security framework primary method used to deliver ransomware. Failing to address phishing opens you to a cyberattack. Learn more at www.VIPREAntivirus.com/Business VIPREANTIVIRUS.COM 5 SMALL BUSINESS UNDER ATTACK RECOGNIZE & FEND OFF WEB-BASED THREATS Phishing poses a serious cyber risk to SMB organizations, WATERING HOLE ATTACKS – Compromising a group but it’s far from the only one. Cybercriminals still use of users through infected websites that targeted group plenty of other methods to break into networks and steal members are known to visit. Once a user visits one of the data. The hacker bag of tricks contains plenty of web- websites, malware is downloaded or sensitive information based threats such as website hijacks, drive-by downloads is stolen to gain network access. and plug-in exploits. PLUG-IN VULNERABILITIES – Exploiting vulnerabilities in Hackers use web-based attacks to download malicious commonly used tools such as Java and file formats such code onto networks to alter files, disrupt network as PDF, CSV and HTML to deliver malware. operations and steal information. Common