Hacking comes to Main Street
Cyber attacks are a huge and growing threat to small businesses — but there are ways to fight back
Rebecca Miller of Peggy Jean’s Pies, a bakery in Columbia, Mo., woke up one morning last summer to a less-than-sweet surprise: Online searches for her shop’s website were leading potential customers to an X-rated destination. “Not just porn — like, capital P porn,” recalls Miller, a former lawyer who runs the shop with her mother, Jeanne Plumley. “Really, really bad porn.”
It took her most of the day and several hundred dollars paid to a thirdparty vendor to clean up the mess. “Who in the world hacks a pie website?” she still wonders.
Lots of people, it turns out. While attacks on big companies like Yahoo and Target grab more headlines, entrepreneurs are almost as vulnerable: In 2015, 43 percent of cyber attacks were waged against small businesses, according to Symantec. “Small-business people don’t realize that the bad guys look at them as low-hanging fruit,” says Michael Cocanower, founder of Phoenix-based IT consulting firm itSynergy, which works with small and medium-size businesses. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps you can take to make yourself less vulnerable — or, if the worst happens, to fight back. email contained ransomware that encrypted the contents, with the hackers demanding that Harrison hand over $600 to get them released.
Now Harrison regularly shows workers samples of real and fake emails, quizzing them on how they’ll react if something suspicious shows up in their inbox. “It’s important for them to know not only when an email is a scam, but also how the scam works from start to finish,” he says. have to do wire transfers very often, so at the time I instructed my bank not to allow those unless I physically came into a branch,” Cocanower says.