3 New Hacking Attempts Targeting Small Businesses

Unfortunately, small businesses are always at more risk of being faced with a cyber attack than anyone else. The reason for this is that hackers see small businesses as an easier target than larger companies, as they tend to have less in the way of cyber security, leaving them vulnerable. 

Hackers are not afraid to expose this weakness, and instead try to find the best way to get through any and all defenses that a company has set up. In this article, we are going to be looking at some of the new hacking attempts on small businesses. If you would like to find out more, keep reading down below.

Phishing

You likey already know what phishing is, but it is still the main way that cyber criminals are targeting small businesses. People keep clicking on the malicious link that the hacker sends them. This is usually done through email, but can be done on other platforms so do be extremely vigilant when it comes to avoiding this. 

When it comes to phishing, there tends to be two reasons why someone would do this. The first is that they require access to sensitive information that they would either like to share with the world, or simply share to cost you a lot of money. The second option is that they want to influence someone into doing things.

Ransomware

Ransomware is another extremely common type of cyber attack. Ransomware gets thousands of businesses every year. This involves encrypting company data so that it cannot be accessed or used by the business. 

The cyber criminal does this by sending a malicious piece of software known as ransomware that effectively locks all the information that a business has. Therefore, if you want access to your information again, you are going to have to pay the ransom so that they will unlock the data.

Back in 2018, 71% of ransomware attacks were aimed at small businesses. This is due to the fact that small businesses are far more likely to pay the ransom. Usually, this occurs because they cannot afford the professional help they need to combat this, they tend to back their data up, and they need to get back to their daily operations sooner rather than later.

SQL Injection Attack

A newer, but extremely popular cyber attack targeting small businesses is SQL injection attacks. A hacker will need to execute an SQL query to the database. They make sure that these are delivered from a client to the business server. Once this has been done, and the injection is complete, the hacker will be able to read, steal, change and delete business data. In fact, they can even go as far as to recover deleted files, and take over the database entirely.

It’s to combat attacks like these that you need to hire a cybersecurity company to handle all of these issues. 

In conclusion, small businesses need to be careful about their use of cyber security. It should always be up to standard, ensuring that there are no vulnerabilities for a hacker to expose. Using education, you can avoid the rest of the attempts by cyber criminals.