Website Cybersecurity Solutions For Small Businesses
Small Business Website Security Services
Small business website security threats are at crisis level.
It’s estimated that as high as 64% of companies have experienced a web-based attack of some sort.
According to Semantic in 2014, “60% of all targeted attacks struck small and mid-sized organizations”, and the numbers continue to rise.
In April of 2017 CNBC referred to this as a “National Crisis” stating that
“Small businesses need all the help they can get. In the last 12 months, hackers have breached half of all small businesses in the United States” – CNBC
In that same article, they reference a survey conducted by Manta.com which found that 87% of small businesses DON’T FEEL THEY ARE AT RISK of a cyber attack.
“Most small-business owners don’t think they’re at risk. As a result, it’s fair to say they are indeed ill-prepared to safeguard against an attack,” – Brian Seeley – Network Engineer (famous for hacking into the FBI)
The High Cost Of Cyber Attacks
According to UPS Capital, on average cyber attacks cost small businesses between $84,000 and $148,000. UPS Capital also goes on to state that…
“60% of small businesses go out of business within six months of an attack” – UPS Capital
The Anatomy of Small Business Website Hack
When we started z5 Marketing our focus was on helping small and mid-size businesses with their websites and digital marketing. Once we began digging into small business websites, it didn’t take us long to see where many agencies are completely dropping the ball. And dropping it in a big way!
While a website doesn’t seem to be the most obvious place for costly cybersecurity attacks, they often play a very vital role.
Websites built and managed by inexperienced individuals or developers who don’t put a big emphasis on security (which accounts for most) often unknowingly launch live websites with security vulnerabilities.
On top of that the average small business website is left unmanaged ignoring any applicable security updates for years (some even decades). Most of these vulnerabilities are well known and leave easy access for even amateur hackers to access your website’s filesystem.
As a result hackers (more likely automated bots) scour the internet continuously looking for these commonly known vulnerabilities. Once a vulnerable website is found they often hijack the site by adding scripts to the site files. These scripts then turn your site into a mule to carry out their dirty work on your web traffic.
The intent of these hackers is usually to add malicious software or scripts to your website so that when anyone visits your site (including your employees and customers) it will infect their computers with malicious software and provide access points to carry out further attacks on sensitive data.
Then if things weren’t already bad enough…
The Real Cost To Your Business
Once search engines (Google, Bing, etc) realize your site has malicious software on it, they will remove your site and any ads from the search engines which can have a big impact on many businesses.
If you have invested money into SEO this process can take months to resolve! This means temporarily nullify your investment for weeks or months (until your site gets fixed and reindex by the search engines)
Then the real kick while you are down can then come to your reputation.
When an existing customer or worse someone responding to a paid ad visits your site they see a red screen saying your site is malicious!
That means you just paid for an ad to send traffic to a webpage displing a warning saying that your site is infected Malware!
And if no one is monitoring your website (which is the case for most small businesses) this may go on for weeks or even months before it is brought to anyone’s attention.
Protecting Your Business Investment
At z5 Marketing we offer both one-time security services as well as ongoing automated monitoring solutions.
Our services are not just limited to securing and protecting your site but also cleaning up and restoring infected sites as well.
Small Business Security Solutions
Fortunately for our clients, we offer several solutions to help avoid these cybersecurity problems. First, we offer website security audits for small businesses where we manually test your site for the most common vulnerabilities (OWASP Top Ten Vulnerabilities).
Then in addition to manual testing, we offer an automated daily website security monitoring service which will be notified within hours of your site being attacked or infected by malicious software. This allows us to go in and fix the problem before anyone even notices it is there.
If your site is infected by malware we offer website emergency website malware removal.
The biggest difference between our malware removal and other automated services is that we don’t just remove the malware… We also go in and fix the source of the problem (the vulnerability) that caused your site to get infected in the first place so it doesn’t happen again.
When a site gets hacked, if the source of the problem is not fixed it is just a matter of time before the site gets hacked again. This is good for business for those removing malware on websites but is not in the best interest of your small business.
In addition to these to services we also offer “website hardening” where we will go into your site and lock down all known security vulnerabilities on your site to help protect your site from future hacks.
z5 Marketing Website Security Services
- Website Security Audits (manual audits)
- Website Security Monitoring
- Malware Removal
- WordPress Security Hardening
If you would like to learn more about our small business website security services or more specifically how we can help your business contact us below.