Nobody thinks it will happen to them. But the ACSC receives a cybercrime report every six minutes in Australia, and small businesses are disproportionately targeted because they typically have weaker defences and fewer resources to respond. The question is not whether your Brisbane business will face a cyber threat. It is whether you will be ready when it happens.
What Readiness Actually Means
Being ready for a cyber attack does not mean having impenetrable security. No organisation achieves that. Readiness means you can detect an attack quickly, contain the damage, recover your systems and data, and continue operating through the incident.
Most small businesses we assess have some security tools in place but no coherent plan for what happens when those tools fail.
The Five Things Every SMB Needs
At minimum, a Brisbane business with 5 to 50 staff should have multi-factor authentication on all business accounts, endpoint protection on every device that connects to your network, automated backups stored separately from your production environment and tested regularly, an incident response plan that your team actually knows about, and cyber awareness training so staff can recognise and report threats.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it covers the fundamentals that stop the majority of common attacks.
The Incident Response Plan
An incident response plan does not need to be a 50-page document. For a small business, it needs to answer four questions: Who do we call first? How do we contain the damage? How do we recover our data and systems? Who do we need to notify?
Write it down, make sure key people know where to find it, and review it at least once a year. If your IT provider is part of the response, make sure their contact details and after-hours process are included.
Test Before You Need It
The worst time to discover your backup does not work is during a ransomware attack. The worst time to discover your incident response plan has gaps is during an actual incident.
Schedule regular backup test restores. Walk through your incident response plan with your team. Run a tabletop exercise where you simulate a scenario and talk through the response steps. This does not need to be elaborate, even a 30-minute discussion once a year dramatically improves your readiness.
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