Cybersecurity Compliance and External Threat Assessments for SMBs

Small and medium-sized businesses are using cybersecurity as a way to build trust and gain competitive advantage. With data privacy laws emerging in states across the country, compliance becomes key when building trust.

You have to prepare your organization to defend against many things including bad actors. These entities know your business has weaknesses that are exploitable. This is why it’s just as important to conduct an external cyber risk/threat assessment, just as it is important to protect your internal assets.

It is challenging work to build a resilient organization, but you’re better for it in the long term.

Small businesses have their own challenges, which we wrote about here. Half the battle is changing your mindset. Understand that your business has value to a bad actor. It’s the data you have or it’s your network and devices that they want.

If you’re a medium-sized business, or you’re growing into one, you have your challenges to deal with. There will be a time of instability when you are growing, which is an opportunity for a threat actor to take advantage of that situation. Where your customers are might mean you have to be compliant with multiple State data privacy laws. That’s on top of anything else your business needs to be complaint with.

Regardless if you’re a small or medium-sized business, cybersecurity compliance, coupled with external cyber risk/threat assessments, will help better protect your organization. It will also help you stay on track with regulations you need to comply with.

This article is to explain to you the importance of cybersecurity compliance and why external cyber risk/threat assessments are important to your organization.

Why SMBs Are High-Value Targets for Cybercriminals

At this stage of the game, consumers and customers know that you have data about them. Even if it’s contact information, that’s useful for a bad actor to launch phishing, vishing, and smishing campaigns. If you deal with customer’s financial, healthcare, and other sensitive data, that’s the icing on the cake for a threat actor. You also have your employee data to protect.

The other things of value to a threat actor are devices, networks, business processes, proprietary data, strategies, vendor lists, internal documents, and the list could go on.

All of the above, if a bad actor got their hands on it, could spawn lawsuits, ruin the goodwill and reputation you worked hard to build, and it could take away your competitive edge.

Our experience helping SMBs revealed to us that the defenses are weak. This is for multiple reasons. This is a combination of lack of resources, secure infrastructure, and knowledge.

Adding to all of this is the constantly changing threat landscape.

Last year’s FBI’s Internet Crime Report showed that there was roughly 300,000 criminal complaints filed by victims that were specific to phishing [Source: FBI]. Over the last couple of years QR codes are now part of the the Social Engineer’s toolkit. Artificial intelligence is making things difficult on organizations too. Phishing, vishing, and smishing attacks are improving because of A.I. It’s helping to reduce the language barrier. It’s creating convincing phone calls through the use of deepfake audio programs.

The social engineering tactics employed by bad actors translate well in launching disinformation campaigns that ruin organizations’ reputations.

We also have to include ransomware, as it’s still lucrative for bad actors. The threat of ransomware is a really good reason to build a resilient organization to survive it’s impact. Your business might be fine, but it might rely on a third party vendor that provides critical information for you to make decisions about pricing. If that vendor is impacted by ransomware, you’re flying blind with the ability to properly price goods or services.

Supply chain attacks bring with them their own set of problems for an organization. If we hop in the wayback machine, it was around 2014 that Home Depot experienced a massive data breach. It happened because the bad actor got a hold of stolen login credentials belonging to an HVAC vendor [Source: Infosecurity Magazine]. On the software supply chain attack side of things, one of the biggest ones was the MOVEit breach of 2023.

The Importance of Cybersecurity Compliance for SMBs

What is cybersecurity compliance you might ask?

Depending on where your organization operates, it means adhering to local, State, Federal (e.g. HIPAA), and in some cases international law (e.g. GDPR). In some instances it’s adhering to industry regulation such as PCI. While we aren’t qualified to give legal advice, with various laws you’ll need all the legal mechanisms in place. That’s where an attorney comes in to help address your legal needs.

On the cybersecurity side of things, it means establishing policies, procedures, and implementing best practices. It’s also building out your cybersecurity framework, which we’ve written about here to give you some insight. It also includes creating Business Continuity, Incident Response, and Disaster Recovery plans to help your business weather an incident small or large.

What are the benefits of compliance?

The most obvious one to us is the protection of the data of all your stakeholders. That includes your customers/clients, employees, investors, and the community you serve. By protecting data, you’re also building trust for your stakeholders.

If something were to happen, like a data breach or outage, you may lessen the financial impact to your organization if sued. This is where a skilled law firm can help in this manner. By properly handling an incident that impacts your stakeholders, they may be understanding. Your organization might take a little hit in reputation, and potentially lose some current customers and prospects. That is the nature of a cyber incident. Things get ugly if you do nothing, which we’ll get to shortly, but we want to talk about one more benefit with being compliant.

There are some Federal laws like HIPAA, and State data privacy laws, that require organizations that process sensitive data on behalf of an entity that collects it to have the proper security measures in place.

For instance, let’s say you run a medial billing/coding service and a healthcare practice, or hospital, taps your business to service them. Now that you’ll be processing patient data you’ll need to abide by HIPAA if you want that work. If your business is contracting with the government, you’ll need to comply with security requirements. If you partner with a large organization, they may want proof that you have the proper security measures/controls/polices in place. This is why being proactive helps you in the long run. It makes it easier for you to partner with organizations that grow your business.

Now let’s talk about non-compliance.

Non-compliance

If you experience a data breach, or customer data was accidentally exposed, it gets very expensive. You can read our article here about the costs of a data breach that breaks things down to the breach itself, the reputation costs, and the legal costs. You’ll also want to check if the State(s) that your business operates in has any “data breach”/”data breach reporting” laws. These laws tell you what you are required to do as far as notifying those affected and what you need to provide stakeholders, at no charge, to protect them. The money you spend working through an incident adds up quickly. This can put your SMB under great financial strain to where you might have to make tough decisions up to, and including, shuttering your organization.

Up to this point, we’ve talked about what compliance is in cybersecurity, it’s benefits, and consequences of non-compliance.

At the beginning of this article we mentioned that external cyber risk/threat assessments help with compliance. Let’s briefly explore how this is so.

How Do External Cyber Risk/Threat Assessments Help With Compliance?

To start, let’s give our definition of what an external cyber risk/threat assessment is.

Our specialty is looking at your organization’s publicly facing digital assets. This might be your website, a web app, or the social media platforms you leverage. We look for, and document, any security issues or gaps that you have. We then expand our scope to look for things outside of your business’ control that you also need to know about such as:

• Did someone steal propriety plans/data?
• Is someone masquerading as your organization to phish, extort, or ruin your reputation through disinformation?
• Is someone misusing, or abusing, your intellectual property?

The report you receive from us shows you what the finding is, how severe the finding is, why it’s a risk, and what you can do to address the findings.

This service fits in with compliance as there are some cybersecurity frameworks that specifically call out the need for a risk assessment to see where your security gaps are. We just happen to specialize in the external side of things. In a future article, we’ll get a little more into detail about this service, but for now, let’s briefly talk about why SMBs need professional expertise when it comes to cybersecurity compliance.

Why SMBs Need Professional Expertise in Cybersecurity Compliance?

There are SMBs that we’ve helped that had nothing in place for any security measures, plans, or policies, and got them moving in a positive direction. We’ve helped clients who knew they didn’t know what to do and reached out to us to get them started because of our expertise. This involved making sure they played nice with Google and Yahoo’s email rules for marketing purposes.

By having experts help, you free up time and resources so that you can focus on growing your business.

Plus you get peace of mind working with someone that has the knowledge and expertise you seek.

Wrapping Things Up

If you’re an SMB, you have challenges to face:

• Lack of resources.
• Knowledge gaps.
• Growing complexity with compliance.
• Ever evolving threats.

You also have opportunity to build a resilient organization and instill trust with your stakeholders through the use of cybersecurity frameworks, policies, plans, and best practices.

How We Help

Depending on your compliance needs, or if you want to be proactive, our external cyber risk/threat assessment service helps document any security gaps. The reporting addresses any findings that we bring to your attention.

With cybersecurity frameworks we take on an advisory role to help you build out your controls and work with you to find affordable tools.

Protect your business today! Use the contact form below to schedule a free strategy call to learn how we help protect your organization and stay competitive.