7 Safety Tips as Hackers Hit Small Businesses

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Hackers have traditionally been more interested in Goliath than David.

Though there have always been the low-hanging fruit of average folks falling for schemes built on email phishing and spam, the real fun and profit came from direct attacks on big companies and services. The "lulz" were especially hearty whenever a major company announced safety improvements or claimed to be one step ahead of the script kiddies and black hats of the world.

Bigger victims remain a prime playground for hackers, but increasingly being a smaller business isn't going to be safer.

Conventional wisdom as to why Apple's(AAPL) OS or Linux systems have relatively few viruses compared with Microsoft(MSFT) is focused on market share: The bigger you are, the more the bad guys want to topple you, was how the thinking went.

Bigger victims remain a prime playground for hackers, but increasingly individual users and small- to midsized businesses are proving more popular targets. The reason, some experts say, is that they offer low-hanging fruit. While even a low-level data breach once required a level of sophistication and a time commitment by hackers, technology and tactics now make it much easier to plunder smaller targets.

"Small to medium-sized businesses represent prime attack targets for many hackers, who favor highly automated, repeatable attacks against these more vulnerable targets, possibly because criminals are opting to play it safe in light of recent arrests and prosecutions of high-profile hackers," the report says.

The number of compromised records involved in data breaches investigated by Verizon(VZ) and the U.S. Secret Service dropped from 144 million in 2009 to only 4 million last year, representing the lowest volume of data loss since the report's launch in 2008. Yet this year's report found approximately 760 data breaches, the largest caseload to date.

The seeming contradiction between low data loss and high number of breaches seen in the Verizon 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report is explained as a significant decline in large-scale breaches caused by a change in tactics by cyber-criminals. "They are engaging in small, opportunistic attacks rather than large-scale, difficult attacks and are using relatively unsophisticated methods to successfully penetrate organizations," the report says. To make that point, the researchers found that only 3% of breaches were considered unavoidable without extremely difficult or expensive corrective action."