(July) t’s tempting for SMBs to believe they’re less a target for hackers and cybercriminals than larger enterprises because of their size. But that’s simply not the case, security experts say. As Dmitriy Ayrapetov, director of product management for Dell SonicWALL (www.sonicwall.com), aptly puts it, “there are no SMB viruses and enterprises viruses”; or, in other words, “malware propagates mostly through the same means, regardless of business size.”
EVERYONE IS A TARGET
Hackers want data, and they don’t care where they get it. A SMB may operate on a smaller scale, but that doesn’t mean hackers will bypass them to fry bigger ish. “Size is irrelevant when it comes to security threats, except as a measure of the volume of ‘stuff’ (data or infrastructure) that the business has,” says James Quin, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) director of research. “A large company that primarily manufactures products backed by no intellectual property (generic pharmaceuticals, for example) has little risk and likely fewer security issues than a small boutique investment company that handles IPOs for cutting-edge technology companies,” he says. “It’s not about the company size; it’s about the value of the data that company holds or the compute capability it has available to be hijacked.”
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