Threats to Small Businesses

Direct losses

A lot of small and medium businesses depend on computers and data stored on computers.
Accountant, architect or solicitor could use computer as a working tool. Virus, hacker’s back door or loss of service could disrupt operation of this tool and damage critical business data.

It could happen in different ways:
- Software used to perform business activities could get unstable or stop working altogether;
- Databases with customer information get corrupted;
- Critical reference information could get inaccessible;

It is quite possible that to restore normal operation several time and resource consuming tasks have to be performed.
- Computers Operating Systems have to be reinstalled and reactivated;
- Databases have to be restored from backups;
- Software reinstalled and reconfigured;
All of these could disrupt or entirely halt normal business activities for couple of days or even more. How much would it cost?

Indirect losses

Business reputation could be harmed if clients would discover that their information is poorly protected.
Clients would have with quite bad feeling for whoever sends them a virus.
What would you feel for someone who sends you infected e-mail? And what if you would learn that e-mail with your business or personal data has been sent to someone by infected computer?
For example the most of the recent viruses (or worms) uses e-mails as the one of the means to infect other computers. Viruses use address book to find e-mail addresses to send itself to.
Some viruses use content of e-mails from the mailbox of infected computer to create looking so legitimate infected e-mails. In plain words it means that virus take text from the e-mail in the mailbox (for example e-mail with client’s business proposition), attach itself to it and send to someone from infected computer address book. Or even simpler – it could be that virus would copy client’s private information and send it to another client alongside with infection.