BELL COUNTY, Texas — As technology continues to evolve the threat of cyber-attacks becomes a bigger and bigger problem for small business owners.
”Small businesses in particular because they don’t have any in-house cybersecurity staff to teach them the best practices and put in the best layers of managerial, administrative, and technical controls,” said Paul Gozaloff, president of Veteran Cybersecurity Group.
Meaning that small businesses are at a much higher risk of cyber-attacks that could be devastating.
Whether your business is bookkeeping or running a restaurant, a big enough cyber-attack can take you out.
"We run payroll for 25 companies and each one of them has at least three employees,” said Becky Fruchey, owner of ABS Bookkeeping and Tax Service in Killeen. “All the way up to one of them has 25 employees from every single person to do payroll for has a social security number. So, of course, we're talking that would completely bankrupt us."
That’s a risk ABS Bookkeeping isn’t willing to take.
”We have a heightened firewall of course,” said Fruchey. “We actually paid somebody to set up a pretty secure server for us so we only log into the one server.”
Restaurants like C&H Hawaiian Grill in Harker Heights are trying to protect the information of customers.
”We don’t want anybody’s data to be compromised,” said owner Hensan Timo. “Whether it’s a customer or me personally. So, it is very important.”
That’s why they hired a company to beef up their security.
”They are basically designing a system for us with that in mind,” said Timo. “That is the top emphasis, to protect all the data that our customers have because there is so much that is going on out there.”
Even if you bounce back financially, you may not be able to rebuild trust and reputation with customers.
That is why cybersecurity experts are urging small businesses to take the threat seriously and at minimum, consult with an expert and get regular risk assessments.
