September 30, 2025
What you don’t know insecurity will hurt you and what you think you know might hurt you even more. After almost two decades in offensive security, I’ve heard it all: “We’re too small to be a target,” “Our MSP has us covered,” “We passed our audit, so we’re good.” But the 2025 Verizon DBIR makes it clear those assumptions are leaving real-world gaps. Threat actors don’t need zero-days and black hoodies when all it takes is a stolen password and a company that thinks the firewall is still all they need to prevent successful attacks. Threat actors are scanning the internet twenty-four hours a day seven days a week looking for targets susceptible to exploitation. Why? To get paid, this is business to them, and you are the target.
“Small businesses are not spared automated attacks don’t differentiate based on company size.” 2025 Verizon DBIR
This is one of the most common beliefs among small businesses that attackers only go after large corporations. The reality? The VerizonDBIR report shows that 60% of breaches involved businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. These organizations are disproportionately hit due to limited security maturity and budget.
Attackers don’t usually manually pick their targets. They use automated tools, phishing campaigns, and ransomware-as-a-service kits that scan the internet for vulnerabilities and credentials. They go after whoever is exposed and smaller businesses often have weaker defenses. Ultimately the attackers are looking to get paid, and anyone who shows signs of possibly exploitable services or expose login pages are good targets for them
Takeaway: Size of your organization doesn’t matter. IT vulnerability does.
“There remains a significant gap between being compliant and being secure. Controls may be documented, but rarely are they tested against actual threats.” 2025 Verizon DBIR
Just because you’re compliant with PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, or SOC 2 doesn’t mean you’re secure.
Compliance is a point-in-time snapshot. An auditor asks questions, checks your documentation, and tests a handful of controls. But if someone makes a misconfiguration the next day or spins up an unprotected cloud instance, your risk posture changes instantly.
Many major breaches happened in environments that were fully “compliant.”
Think of it like a vehicle emissions sticker it shows your car passedinspection on a specific day. It doesn’t mean you can skip oil changes andmaintenance.
Takeaway: Compliance is a baseline, not a guarantee. Security requires continuous attention.
“Credentials are the most sought-after datatype... attackers don’t need to ‘break in’ if they can log in.” 2025 Verizon DBIR
I can’t count how many times I heard this as a pen tester: “We installed endpoint protection and a firewall what more do we need?”
The answer: a lot more.
Modern attacks use fileless malware, credential theft, and “living off the land” techniques. In plain terms, attackers move through your network as legitimate users making them hard to detect with traditional tools. As an example, I compromised the credentials of someone in a shipping department once and use those credentials to access the HR server. Unless there is a solid business use case that anyone in your enterprise should be able to access any servers and information, you should be restructuring your networks and permissions and setting alerts for any time someone not authorized to access something tries. It may not be the employee trying to access the server, just someone with their valid credentials
Basic tools offer foundational defense but they’re not enough. You need endpoint detection and response (EDR), identity protection, strong MFA, continuous monitoring, and well-defined access controls. AE Business Solutions can help with all these things and test your defenses in real time to help make sure your alerting is working well.
Takeaway: A firewall won’t save you if the attacker logs in with real credentials.
“Delegated responsibility without clear visibility often leads to misconfigurations, missed alerts, or slow response times.” 2025 Verizon DBIR
Outsourcing IT or relying on a small internal team is common but assumingthey’ve got security fully covered is a risky bet. Most verbiage in MSPcontracts focus on uptime and availability. Active threat hunting is not intheir wheelhouse.
Hiring help is smart. But delegating doesn’t mean abdicating. You still need oversight, reporting, and clearly defined escalation paths. Playbooks for what to do in the event of a breach are something that very few businesses have. And out of the places that do have these, fewer run exercises to make sure that the playbooks are accurate or looking for gaps in their playbooks.
Takeaway: Security is a shared responsibility even with an MSP on board.
“The time to discovery still remains high in industries lacking mature detection and response capabilities.” 2025 Verizon DBIR
Many businesses assume that if a breach occurred, they’d see alerts orsigns of suspicious behavior. However, detection is a major problem.According to the 2025 DBIR, more than 33% of breacheswere discovered by external parties not the victim org itself. Thinkabout that, a security researcher or partner whom you do business with contactthe breached enterprises 33% of the time. Detection and response remaindelayed, particularly in SMB environments.
As a former red teamer, I can tell you: attackers are quiet. They study your environment, avoid detection, and dwell for days or even months before eventually triggering alarms. And by that time, more than likely data and you network has been mapped, sorted and exfiltrated.
If you’re not running a next generation firewall, EDR, SIEM, or threat hunting across your environment, you likely won’t notice anything until it’s too late. You need to have multiple layers of defense and detection, collecting data from everything from firewalls and switches as well as logging all PowerShell execution within your environment. This can lead to alert fatigue but with AI some vendors like Palo Alto are automating responses and deduplicating events so that your defenders can focus on the issues that need business intelligence to really understand the impact and next steps.
Takeaway: Don’t assume you’ll see the breach. Build visibility to find it before the damage is done.
Security is no longer about set-it-and-forget-it tools or checking boxes. It’s about awareness, active defense, and honest evaluation of your risks.
If any of these five myths sound familiar, it’s time to reframe your approach because what you think you know might be exactly what puts your business in harm’s way. This is where AE Business Solutions comes in, our Solution Architects and Engineers have deep backgrounds in all aspects of network security and configurations. You are not alone in this fight to protect your business; AE can help you.
Author: Robert Chuvala