As a small business, your website is a critical component of your success — in fact, it’s hard to be in business at all without a website these days. SEO is vital to ensuring your website gains the most visibility from as many potential customers as possible. Small businesses spend an average of $497 per month on SEO services to improve search rankings, keyword selection, and number of backlinks. However, an increased focus on SEO among small businesses has led to a popular type of cyberattack with the potential to destroy your search rankings.

Negative SEO attacks (also called SEO spam attacks) accounted for more than half of all cyberattacks in 2018 and have become increasingly common. This number was also up 7.3% from the previous year. These attacks sink website search rankings by deluging sites with countless files containing malicious keywords and backlinks. Search rankings can make or break a small business, so understanding how to strengthen SEO security and prevent these types of attacks is a must.

Read More

As a website owner, data loss can cause serious issues for your business. You can defend your site from the top cybercriminals, have the best hosting platform, and secure your platform with a strong password, but none of this is relevant if you aren’t performing website backups on a consistent basis. 

It’s essential that businesses of all sizes back up their websites. You rely on your website to promote your brand, attract clients, and perhaps even generate revenue via ecommerce capabilities. If you don’t back up your site, you risk losing thousands of hours of your website content in a single moment. How do you put a price tag on irrecoverable data loss? You can’t!

Read More

In November 2018, security researchers from Check Point made an interesting discovery about the wildly popular game “Fortnite” — the website was vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Thanks to an old, unsecured webpage, researchers found out that potential hackers could gain unauthorized access to users’ accounts, in-game currency, and audio recording capabilities — all without ever needing their login information.

The cross-site scripting attacks that dominate headlines tend to be larger-profile cases with big-name companies; in reality, businesses of all sizes can fall victim to this kind of cyberattack. In fact, cross-site scripting attacks account for 31% of all attacks — making it the most common type of attack (followed by SQL injection at 20%).

Read More

In the world of cybersecurity, the looming menace of advanced persistent threats and state-sponsored attack groups tend to dominate the headlines. However, research indicates that phishing attacks are the most common threat — by far.

Microsoft’s “Security Intelligence Report, Volume 24” shows a 250% increase in the number of phishing attacks since 2018. If you think the primary victims of email-related breaches are large corporations with vast amounts of data, think again. Small and mid-size businesses are now the preferred target of cybercriminals, and these organizations have a lot to lose. In fact, 60% of them fail within six months of a cyberattack.

To avoid becoming a victim, it’s critical to prevent phishing attacks.

Read More