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Protect Your Small Business Against Cyber Attacks Cybercrime costs the economy more than $1 trillion per year, and crooks are increasingly setting their sights on small businesses. A look at the most destructive threats to your network--and what you need to do about them.

By Ericka Chickowski

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

If you are like millions of small-business owners in America, you probably can't imagine how a cybercriminal halfway around the world could possibly want to target little old you. After all, with so many large corporations out there in the big, bad cyberworld, your laptop or web server is hardly worth the bother, right?

Wrong.

"People expect targeted attacks to go after large enterprises, but the bad guys and the crooks don't really care where the money comes from," says John Maddison, senior vice president of software-as-a-service and managed services at the security firm Trend Micro, whose North American division is based in Cupertino, Calif. "If they've managed to get identity and credentials and information from a small business, they'll go after them as well."