Ep. 082: Cyber Criminals Target Small Business

Guest: Dominic Vogel, cyber security specialist

Big businesses are doing such a good job of thwarting the efforts of hackers they have turned their attention to small business.

That is according to cyber security expert Dominic Vogel. He says, “What's happened is that smaller and mid-sized businesses are being hit really, really hard. In fact for last year, for 2015, over 40 percent of all cyber attacks were focused on small and mid-sized businesses.”

Small business and a naive public are ripe for cyber attacks because neither pay enough attention to their online safety. Vogel says most people don’t protect passwords properly or change them frequently enough or install program upgrades. They use public wifi and make themselves targets for other threats. He says “Hackers go where the money is. They focus their attention on the top five applications in use.”

According to Vogel the number one program under threat is email. “The reason is most of your sensitive applications tie back to your email, like your online banking. If you need to reset your online banking, it generally will tie back to your email. Your email is sort of like your heart which everything ties back to that, that's why email is considered a sensitive application.”