Hackers attacking your site are not necessarily acting as individuals. Nearly two-thirds of all organized attacks or successful breaches originate from Eastern Europe. More and more, there are groups of cybercriminals acting together to target a specific online business.
Why are they doing this? In almost all cases the answer is pretty simple; they do it for money. Hackers or hacktivists are rarely involved in attacking your site due to disagreement or protests on current events. Rarely will you be running an online business that is directly involved in controversial topics at that particular time. You should mostly be concerned with hackers trying to obtain confidential data or financial details of your clients. Being faced with a single hacker may not necessarily mean a better chance of defending your website from attacks every time, but it sure can be better than facing several at once.
Running an online business may not seem to be the target for any hacktivists. However, that does not mean no security measure needs to be set in place. If you have no defenses then obtaining access to your site is that much easier. Not every hacker is going to look for the hardest sites to get into. Having said that, there does seem to be a trend of hacktivism trending towards larger worldwide organizations.
Prepared is Better Than Facing the Consequences
So if trends and patterns of hackers reveal them to sometimes be attacking smaller businesses there would be less money to steal in these cases. This is what brings us back to several hackers working on the same objective. More attacks on smaller businesses can mean a less risky “heist” while hauling sensitive data from several unsuspecting sites and in some cases equaling the same total amount as one attack on a large well-defended business. Would officials be more inclined to go after several smaller attacks or go after the one large attack?
This is where it is even more vital to make sure a small online business has the firewalls, DDoS hardware and server security software in place and up to date as it is most likely the authorities just do not have the resources to go after every single small cyber attack reported. On top of that, it will hurt a small online businesses reputation regarding security for its clients.
Many online businesses interact and deal with other companies in their day to day operations. It should be common practice to make sure all companies involved are also adhering to stringent security practices and implementing strong security measures. If there is one weak link in the chain all parties involved can suffer. This can be either publicly via their reputation with their clients and the online community (forums, chat rooms, news sites etc.) or with officials since the affecting businesses were associated with that hacked company in some way.
One of the best things to do is take the necessary measures in such a scenario. This will minimize the damage to your online business. Then inform your customers what actions they need to take. This ensures the safety of their financial information or personally identifiable data.