A backdoor attack is a type of malware that gives cybercriminals unauthorized access to a website. Cybercriminals install the malware through unsecured points of entry, such as outdated plug-ins or input fields. Once they enter through the back door, they have access to all your company’s data, including customers’ personal identifiable information (PII).
As the name suggests, a backdoor attack is stealthy, and cybercriminals often slip in undetected.
The holidays are just around the corner, and with it comes the inevitable holiday shopping rush. In fact, holiday shopping can account for up to 30 percent of annual sales for online retailers. As Black Friday kicks off what is expected to be another lucrative online holiday season, there are vast opportunities for cybercriminals to steal shopper’s information through spoofed websites, malicious coupon code links, and phishy marketing campaigns. Any downtime resulting from an attack can severely impact holiday profits, not to mention annual revenue. This time of year, it’s more important than ever that ecommerce businesses make cybersecurity a top priority in order to protect their website, customers, and bottom line.
Additionally, consumers should be aware of the risks that exist online to defend their information proactively. Being cyber-aware while shopping online is the new reality for consumers, and it becomes even more imperative during the holiday season.
Your small business is growing fast. That’s good news! But rapid growth also presents new challenges. Perhaps most importantly, as sales and website traffic increase, you become a more attractive target for cybercriminals.
At SiteLock, we developed a proprietary risk score based on over 500 variables to help website owners gauge the overall risk of their sites on a scale from low to high. Each of the variables can be grouped into three main categories: a site’s complexity, its popularity, and its composition. In general, the more variables a site has, the higher the risk level. Those websites deemed high risk are 26 times more likely to experience a breach.
Have you ever visited a website — only to be greeted by an alarming red screen that reads: “The site ahead contains malware”? That’s quite the deterrent, and chances are, you left the page in a hurry. That’s what happens when Google and other search engines blacklist a website.
Blacklisting websites is how search engines protect browsers from malicious content. Google and other search engines send bots to scan websites and flag anything suspicious. If your website is deemed a threat, then it’s removed from the search engine’s results page. And for small businesses that rely on their websites to capture and convert leads, this can have serious consequences.
What It Means to Be Blacklisted
Don’t expect alarms to go off when cybercriminals launch an attack. In fact, it’s just the opposite. What do cybercriminals want? Mostly to remain invisible. That’s why they make every effort to fly under the radar — and why attacks can go unnoticed for months or even years.
Take a recent cyber attack on Florida healthcare provider AdventHealth. The attack was discovered in February 2019 — a full year after cybercriminals gained access. Attackers used that lengthy window to steal the personal records of 50,000 patients and cover up the evidence of their crime.
Website security seals are ultimately about improving two things – trust and sales. And without the first, the second won’t follow. Small businesses with little-known brands always have a tough time persuading new customers that they’re a safe place to do business. And not only that orders will be honored and delivered as promised, but that the site itself is safe. That’s because unsafe sites can be a death-knell for customer trust and confidence, and perhaps even for the business.
Most small businesses typically don’t have the proper security measures in place because they don’t know they’re at risk of cyberthreats, or they don’t know how to protect themselves. This leaves a company’s network, emails, computers, and mobile devices at risk of compromise—especially its website.
We’ve rounded up 69 easy and effective cybersecurity tips to help protect your small business from disruptive cyberattacks. We’ve organized these tips by category to make them more easily digestible.
When it comes to data breaches, we tend to hear only about the “big ones” — from Target to Equifax to, most recently, Wipro. So it’s easy to see why people assume these kinds of events exclusively happen to large corporations. After all, who would want to go after the minnows when there are so many whales up for grabs?
Being lulled into this false sense of security is dangerous for small to midsize businesses. SMBs are just as likely to be hit by cyberattacks as their larger counterparts, and when cyberattacks do land, they’re less likely to bounce back. Even a cursory glance at some small business data breach statistics makes that clear: Following a cyberattack, 60% of SMBs end up going out of business. And every minute of downtime following a small business data breach costs $427.
Authored by Sam Bocetta – Sam Bocetta is a freelance journalist specializing in U.S. diplomacy and national security, with emphases on technology trends in cyberwarfare, cyberdefense, and cryptography.
With more consumers and B2B enterprises conducting business in the cyber world, security threats are an increasing concern. While most business owners and website administrators are aware of the problem, too few have the information or resources they need to combat it. Winning the ongoing battle against cybercrime and criminals starts with understanding the nature of the threats and how to combat them.
How high is your business’ cyber threat intelligence?
The extent of the damage a malware attack can have on your website typically depends on a number of variables, not the least of which is your response time. The longer it takes to detect and remove malware, the more expensive the recovery process becomes. Unfortunately, many types of malware are deliberately designed to keep themselves concealed for as long as possible. Eventually, however, the symptoms of a malware-infected website can become hard to miss.
