Top Layer Raises Red Flag
Even customers that previously ignored their susceptibility are paying more attention as stories about stolen credit-card data become more common, Bunn said.
eing small doesn’t make you invisible.
That’s the message security vendor Top Layer is sending to businesses that think they are too small to show up on hackers’ radars.
“The thing that’s new in smaller businesses is that the argument that ‘nobody cares about us, nobody attacks us’ is not holding,” said Mike Paquette, vice president of technology at intrusion-prevention vendor Top Layer, Westborough, Mass. “Anybody with dependence on Internet transactions, regardless of whether they are big or well-known, is a target.”
Small businesses make attractive targets because they typically don’t have a mature IT infrastructure in place, Paquette said.
Earlier this year, the company rolled out Attack Mitigator 5500-50, a lower-capacity, lower-priced version of its intrusion-prevention system. The appliance aims to protect SMB customers from a variety of threats, including hackers, Trojans, worms and denial-of-service attacks.
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Now Top Layer has launched a leasing program to make the $15,000 appliance a better fit into the budgets of small businesses.
While all small businesses that use the Internet are potential targets, those that deal with sensitive information, such as Social Security or bank account numbers, are more likely to get hit, said Ike Bunn, president of Enterprise Network Services, a Raleigh., N.C., network design and consulting firm.
ENS is now pitching the new appliance to a CPA firm of only 75 employees, Bunn said. “A lot of people have that reaction, that they’re too small and they don’t need it, but when you put an IPS inline, it’s quite an eye-opener to see how much [bandwidth] is taken up by unwanted or even illegal traffic,” he said.