Maybe you watch the news. Hackers are out to get you. Maybe they’re Chinese or Russians and maybe just teenagers living in a basement. They’ve done billions in damages to some of the best companies and also convinced your mom to pay them $600 by pretending to be the IRS.
The security industry isn’t much help, either. There are millions of products and millions of salespeople trying to convince you that their doohickey will fix everything. But you run a bike repair shop, and you’re not convinced that the $30,000 a year they want to “dynamically detect threats in realtime with state-of-the-art machine learning” is worth it.
How do you know it's helping?
What if you don’t buy it, you get hit, and you lose everything?
What do you do?
This guide provides simple advice about how to protect yourself without breaking the bank. This series is aimed at small businesses in the USA – the core ideas are still good for larger shops or those in other countries, but the specifics might look different. If you are big enough to have a full-time IT person, you should also look at the upcoming Security for Medium Businesses.
Ready? Make your plan.