I'm a small business. Hackers go after the big fish, so why would they bother with me?

The small fish reasoning assumes attackers pick their targets the way a burglar cases a neighborhood. Some do, and those ones do go after big companies. But the overwhelming majority of attacks work like commercial fishing, not spearfishing: automated tools scan the entire internet around the clock, probing every network, every mailbox, and every login page they can find. Those tools do not know or care how big you are. They only care whether you are easy to get into.

Here is the uncomfortable part: being small often makes you the better target. A big company has a security team, monitored systems, and layered defenses. A ten-person business often has none of that, which means the same automated attack that bounces off the big fish works on the small one. Attackers know this. Phishing kits, ransomware, and fake invoice scams are priced and built for volume, and small businesses are the volume.

It also helps to think about what attackers actually want, because it is rarely "a big famous company." They want money moved out of a bank account, a mailbox they can use to send convincing fake invoices to your customers, credentials they can resell, and data they can hold for ransom. A small business has every one of those things. Some attackers even use small businesses as stepping stones into the larger companies they work with, because a trusted vendor's email gets opened.

We see the results locally, not in headlines: compromised mailboxes quietly sending payment scams to customers, ransomware locking a business's files on a random Tuesday, and owners discovering their password from an old breach has been for sale for years. None of these businesses were targeted because of who they were. They were caught because the net swept past and something was open.

The good news is that the same math works in your favor. Because most attacks are automated and lazy, a modest set of defenses makes you a poor target: multi-factor authentication, patched systems, filtered email, monitored endpoints, tested backups, and a team that knows what phishing looks like. You do not need an enterprise budget. You need enough layers that the net slides past you and catches someone else.