2025 Cybersecurity Best Practices for Small Businesses

Small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly vulnerable to these attacks, as they often lack the infrastructure and resources needed to keep up with the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. Fortunately, by maintaining a proactive cybersecurity posture and providing cybersecurity training for your team, SMBs can shore up many of their vulnerabilities, and working with an external provider can further strengthen the IT environment.

This guide will look at the leading cybersecurity tips and how SMBs can make optimal use of resources to bolster cyber defenses. We'll show the importance of engaging your team as you minimize your attack surface and explain key cybersecurity best practices for employees to follow as they join the effort to protect your digital assets.

Complete Employee Cybersecurity Awareness and Training

AI-powered cyberattacks such as deepfakes, polymorphic malware, and personalized phishing campaigns have all made the threat landscape more dangerous to navigate. But your greatest vulnerability is still your employees.

While disgruntled or compromised workers can be a danger to your operations, more often the danger is an employee who accidentally clicks a ransomware link or is tricked by a deepfake or another social engineering maneuver. It takes more than a one-time cyber awareness session for workers to be able to detect today's advanced threats. Your team needs regular refreshers on the leading digital best practices and ongoing training on the latest cybersecurity threats.

A complete employee cybersecurity training curriculum should provide continual education on how to recognize phishing, ransomware, and social engineering attacks. They should learn proper device hygiene and data compliance, as well as how to respond in the event of a breach. Also, foster a security-first culture where employees feel comfortable reporting suspicious activity so that you can identify threats early on.

Be Aware of Social Engineering Attacks

Social engineering attacks employ deception, coercion, or other behavioral tactics to manipulate employees into exploiting their own network's vulnerabilities — and they're a leading form of cyberattack. Up to 98% of all cyber threats rely on social engineering of some form. Because so many variations exist, it's important to train your employees on how to detect and respond to different types of threats. Examples of common social engineering attacks include:

Phishing, where attackers send deceptive emails enticing recipients to click a malicious link. The majority (59%) of businesses have fallen victim to a phishing attack in the last 12 months.

• Vishing, where attackers call targets and impersonate companies or government authorities to get them to provide sensitive information
• Whaling, where attackers target CEOs or other executives to authorize transactions or surrender sensitive information
• Pretexting, where attackers fabricate a scenario to lure or intimidate victims into divulging sensitive data or granting unauthorized system access
• Baiting, where attackers entice victims with the promise of a reward if they comply with their demands

While AI has made social engineering attacks far more personalized and difficult to detect, there are still signs that give them away. Conducting simulated phishing campaigns helps test your employees' readiness before an attack and shows them what to look for so that they won't be deceived. You can use the results of these simulations to tailor your future training programs, improving your team's cyber resilience.

Regularly Review Incident Response Plans (IRPs)

Even with a well-trained workforce and the right tools in place, the frequency of cyberattacks these days means that eventually an incident may still occur. Incident response plans (IRPs) provide your team with guidance on how to handle a cyberattack so that they'll be prepared in the event of a breach. IRPs are critical for minimizing downtime and ensuring that your team follows the right protocols in a time of crisis, and can mitigate any financial or data losses you may incur.

Follow these IRP best practices:

• Test the effectiveness of your response beforehand with tabletop exercises and simulations
• Create clear communication plans containing specific roles, channels, and points of contact
• Use playbooks, frameworks, industry standards, and automation to streamline your responses

Cyber threats are continuously evolving, so your IRP should evolve with them. Cybersecurity has always been an iterative process, and experts recommend reviewing and updating your IRP at least once a year, and preferably every month or quarter. Also review your IRP if you incur a breach, and give your employees a chance to give and receive feedback on how to improve your plan.

Regularly Assess Access Control and Data Protection

Bank accounts, credit cards, and personal identification information (PII) may all be stored in your system, and giving your employees unlimited access to it could easily result in a breach. Access control manages which employees are authorized to use certain parts of your data, helping you keep your data risks to a minimum.

Your data may be located in multiple places and be accessed by many employees, so access control should cover multiple aspects of security:

• Practicing the principle of  least privilege, ensuring that each employee can only access the information they must have to perform their tasks
• Updating permissions when employees change roles or leave the company, so that they can't use stale credentials to view unauthorized data
• Implementing multifactor authentication (MFA) and strong password policies to better defend against cyber threats

Another cybersecurity best practice for SMBs to follow is to encrypt all sensitive data at rest and in transit. Many encryption tools are quite affordable and user-friendly, with some coming automatically installed on certain operating systems or offered for free. This makes them highly accessible for SMBs with limited resources. As these tools render your sensitive data illegible if it's exfiltrated without the decryption key, they can help you maintain your data security and compliance in the event of a cyberattack.

Use Strong Authentication Practices

Authentication ensures that every access attempt is valid. A few authentication best practices include:

• Creating strong, unique passwords complete with uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, special characters, and character minimums.
• Requiring periodic password changes to prevent password-guessing and brute-force attacks.
• Avoiding password reuse across work and personal accounts, minimizing data or system compromise if a password is hacked.

However, a strong password is no longer enough to protect against today's sophisticated cyberattacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a necessity for proper authentication. SMBs can use text or email messages, authenticator apps (some versions are free), push notifications, knowledge factors, or biometrics to secure their authentication. With so many options available, SMBs can find an affordable, simple solution for keeping their network and consumers secure.

Don’t Forget Physical Security Measures

While much of cybersecurity consists of digital solutions, physical security can also be a critical factor. Unauthorized entrance into a server room or data center can give threat actors a way to access your data, so implement physical protection measures like:

• Storing physical documents containing sensitive data in locked cabinets
• Securing devices with screen locks
• Installing surveillance systems, locks, or other physical access control mechanisms to restrict access to vulnerable spaces

Sometimes a threat actor will attempt to access a space by tailgating, or following an authorized employee into a space. To prevent this practice, make sure that your employees don't allow anyone into a vulnerable area that isn't allowed to be there, and never let them share their credentials.

Protect Devices and Workstations

Proper device hygiene keeps threat actors from accessing your network on your endpoints. An SMB with 50–100 employees can have 114 endpoints on average, so any step to secure them can go a long way in reducing your attack surface area. Practices to protect devices include:

• Locking screens when you step away
• Applying all patches and security updates
• Only installing authorized software or apps, preventing any shadow IT

Securing physical endpoints such as workstations also ensures that only employees with the appropriate privileges can view your data. Workers should keep sensitive information stored away instead of leaving it out on a desk and refrain from discussing any topics that require confidentiality when others could hear.

Report Suspicious Activity Immediately

"If you see something, say something.” This motto for fostering a culture of healthy physical security holds for cybersecurity, too. Open communication is one of the top cybersecurity best practices for employees to follow. Encourage them to report suspicious emails, unusual system behavior, or possible data loss.

Fast reporting reduces damage by speeding up your response time and preventing incidents from spreading. The sooner your employees notify you of something suspicious, the sooner you can contain the blast radius.

Upgrade Your Cybersecurity and Protect Your Business

As cyberthreats become increasingly sophisticated and scalable, SMBs must be diligent about keeping their digital assets secure. Instead of approaching it as a one-time project, SMB leaders must implement an ongoing, holistic cybersecurity strategy, revising processes and instilling new ones as they go.

Strengthening your digital security may take an investment in your IT environment and your employees. But the improvements in your brand reputation and operational efficiency make this investment more than worthwhile — and the cost is far less than incurring a breach.

Start your cybersecurity renovation by educating your employees on these best practices to build a safer digital future. Consult a cybersecurity expert on Clutch to help identify your vulnerabilities, and leverage managed security providers (MSPs) and training experts to bring all team members on board.

About the Author

Hannah Hicklen Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Hannah Hicklen is a content marketing manager who focuses on creating newsworthy content around tech services, such as software and web development, AI, and cybersecurity. With a background in SEO and editorial content, she now specializes in creating multi-channel marketing strategies that drive engagement, build brand authority, and generate high-quality leads. Hannah leverages data-driven insights and industry trends to craft compelling narratives that resonate with technical and non-technical audiences alike. 

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