Name: Isis Jordan

Date: February 13, 2019

Details

Small businesses are essential to our current economy. They are constantly growing, and at the moment there are a total of twenty-eight million small businesses in the United States alone. With all the small businesses, they play an imperative role not just in our economy, but also in the cyber infrastructure.

With small businesses being important to our economy, that does not mean they are not prone to being cyber attacked. They are what attackers consider “soft targets”, because small businesses may not have the extra funds to afford cyber security and information security due to its rising cost. They should look at investing in some sort of Information security for their business. Information security is protecting important information from all unauthorized users, protecting information from any unknown changes, and lastly protecting any disruptions on how information is accessed. Confidentiality, Integrity, and availability is what information security focuses on.

Small Businesses take a much harder hit if they are attacked than bigger organizations. If attacked then they would have to take action, which can become very costly. Which is why they should be more prepared to prevent any attacks or secure their information properly. Having a durable information security program in place can help a business with keeping employees, keeping customers and gaining future customers. All customers who put their trust in small businesses have an automatic expectation that their delicate information is secured and won’t be manipulated by a cyber-attack. By protecting a customer’s information, it shows how much their worth is to the business and shows the exceptional customer service the business provides to the customers.

With the constant growing cyber security threats today, a cyber security strategy should include training employees properly, protect vital information, building a firewall for internet connections, creating an action plan, creating user accounts for every employee, securing wi-fi networks, limiting employee access to information, and password and authentication.

Small Businesses should make an attempt to include Information security in budget. The cost of a cyber-attack can average a small business anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000, and that does not include revenue that has been already lost. This can also cause them to go out of business if the loss cannot be recovered from. If the proper precautions were taken, then a Cyber- attack may not have affected them as hard or could have been prevented from the start.

References

Security Now,About STTR | SBIR.gov,

Paulsen, Celia, and Patricia Toth. Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals, 2016.