If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million times—hackers do not care what the size of your business is. They’re after your valuables, and SMBs are increasingly appealing targets because they usually have fewer cyber defenses. The results of Symantec’s 2011 Internet Security Threat Report certainly point to this trend, as I discussed in a post earlier this month.
Verizon’s 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report—released this week—tells a similar story. Verizon reports that while the total number of attacks is on the rise, the number of records exposed per breach declined. Cybercriminals are shifting their focus to small and medium businesses.
The folks from Symantec’s encryption team have weighed in on the report at the In Defense of Data blog. There are some very interesting insights that SMBs can glean from this assessment, as well as best practices for protecting sensitive data.
It’s imperative that SMBs are not only aware of the methods that cybercriminals use, but also how to guard against attacks that are becoming more and more common.