‘Why would anyone hack me? I’m just a small business owner’

In arguably the most common question small business owners have, when they are asked about security is that “why would anyone hack me, I’m just a small business owner ?”. People should understand the greater consequences which await their immediate attention. Truth be told, small and medium size businesses are targeted by hackers the most. Here’s why hackers hack small and medium businesses the most:

Data Theft

Any business owner might object, it doesn’t matter if someone has certain details about their website. But if these details contain user emails and their passwords for your application, there is a very high chance of it being the same password for their primary account. Any sort of data leak at your website compromises the trust of your customers on your website and you lose a lot in business.

Situations can be worst if the information that had been intercepted, stolen by intruders when it is sensitive information such as credit card details. There are various websites in the black market where hackers trade stole credit card information and this is known as carding. No small business will survive this magnitude of attack against their infrastructure.

Botnets

As mentioned before your hacked website might be part of something bigger. An attacker might use any weak vulnerable website to transmit, distribute malware by successfully deceiving the actual clients of that business. Attackers use such compromised websites in the different type of cases.

• They use the bandwidth of such compromised victims to keep a file hosted on torrents with increased number of seeders.
• They secretly store stolen information on other computers without their knowledge, so a particular security attack can not be traced back to the actual hacker.
• They use your computers/servers for the deadly Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) Attacks.

The ultimate outcome of these activities would be suffering of your customers, since every operation on the internet leave logs behind, tracing the source of malware distribution is not difficult, ultimately deteriorating the affected business’ reputation in the society.

Why would anyone hack me?

I feel by now this question has become insignificant and your opinion might have changed to I need to be careful now, But what should I do to secure myself?

We at Astra, hope that we reach out to the maximum number of people to educate, explain and demonstrate them security so they can defend themselves better. Astra provides a great firewall solution to keep hackers away from your website also Astra blog maintains and updates their content regularly to help you secure your e-presence. Feel free to reach out!

Tags: Botnets, carding, Data Theft, Security

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