Small Business Isn't Off the Radar. It's the Weak Link

There is a piece of conventional wisdom that quietly shapes how a lot of small and midsize businesses think about security, the assumption that they are too small to be worth an attacker's time. It is not just wrong, it has the relationship backward.

Large enterprises have generally invested heavily in their own security, which has made attacking them directly harder. It has not made them less attractive, it has just changed the most efficient path in. That path often runs through smaller vendors, contractors, and partners.

A small business with a data connection, a vendor account, or system access tied to a larger organization is a way in that skips the large organization's defenses entirely. If the smaller business has weaker security, simply because it has fewer resources, that gap becomes the easiest route. A five person accounting firm with access into a hospital network, or a small logistics company connected to a utility provider, is not too small to matter. Its size is often exactly what makes it useful.

Two things worth doing this week:

Take an honest inventory of what your business connects to, every vendor relationship and data sharing arrangement with a larger organization.

Treat basic security hygiene as a business requirement. Access controls and MFA matter just as much for ten people as ten thousand.

Do this today. Pick one larger organization you connect to, and ask them directly what security standards they expect from you.

Stay inside the line.