Protect Your Business Now to Reduce Downtime Later:

When you run a business, sometimes you have to spend money to make money.  Sometimes you have to take precautions today to avoid pitfalls tomorrow.  That's certainly true when it comes to protecting your business from computer viruses, crashes, hackers, annoying pop-up ads and other threats to productivity.

Don't assume small businesses get overlooked by the cyber bad guys.  Turns out small businesses may be more vulnerable because they don't have resources to adequately protect themselves against attacks.  That makes them easier prey. 

Most attackers use the processing power of computers as their weapon.  They might use a virus to spread a DoS program to hundreds of thousands of computers.  They might use a password-guessing program to try every word in the dictionary as a password.  Of course, the first passwords they check are "password," "letmein," "opensesame," and a password that is the same as the username.  They have programs that randomly probe every IP address on the Internet looking for unprotected systems and, when they find one, have port scanners to see whether there are any ports open for attack.  If they find one, they have a library of known vulnerabilities that they can use to try to gain access.

(Very) Useful Links:

The National Cyber Alert System managed by US-CERT
Security Guidance Center from Microsoft
Small Business Security Computer Check List from Microsoft
Safe Computing Guide from Trend Micro