With more than 4 billion internet users currently worldwide, the internet is an incredible way for people to stream information and for businesses to make immense profits through online services and sales. It's also the leading cause of security breaches that put 61 percent of small businesses out of business within six months of a cyber attack.

Do you know how to spot a phishing email and are you training your employees on this as well? Why, we ask? Because email phishing is still the #1 cause of malware infections for small businesses.

According to the Wombat 2018 State of the Phish report, 92.4 percent of malware is delivered via email, 76 percent of organizations say they experienced phishing attacks and 49 percent of successful phishing attacks resulting in malware infections.

As seen in the February 2019 edition of The Small Business Monthly, Jamie Lembeck a Cybersecurity advocate for The Purple Guys is featured in their Cybersecurity expert panel offering education to small and mid-sized business owners regarding the rise in security threats small business owners face.

This article was originally featured on Thinking Bigger Business Media 
Hacking used to have one major barrier to entry: talent. Unfortunately, the dark web has enabled individuals with nothing more than a bad attitude and a small amount of spare cash to buy sophisticated hacking tools.

You already know that your business is always at risk of a data security breach, and you’ve taken all appropriate precautions. Your personal information is as vulnerable, if not more so. If either your business or your personal accounts are hacked, it can wreak havoc on your finances in both realms.

Your business has a lot of sensitive data about your operations, your partners, and your customers. You are likely (hopefully) doing everything you can to protect that information from hackers who want to steal it and make money off it. You’ve even hired an IT support company to make things more secure — unless your IT provider is inadvertently making you vulnerable to attack!

Many businesses, especially those too small to have an IT budget big enough for a robust internal defense team, turn to IT support companies to meet their IT needs.

This year, some of the most popular companies faced massive security breaches, affecting millions of users and exposing private and financial information. This data was either acquired for malicious use by the hacker themselves or sold off to the highest bidding cyber-criminal organizations.

Hackers are experts at their craft and always on the lookout for innovative ways to breach a network and extract private information. They cleverly mimic the company's own sites, for instance when hackers built an exact copy of a large local hospital's website.

Each year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are expected to be a shopper’s paradise with the biggest discounts available from almost every retail store, in-store and online. With more than 4 billion internet users currently worldwide, it is also a hacker’s dream to target the expected two biggest online shopping days.

The breach of as many as 90 million Facebook accounts is bad news for the social media company, but it’s even worse news for the users whose sensitive personal data was compromised. That’s because hackers won’t make their money by posting an embarrassing status update or “liking” Nickelback on your profile.