Hey. Hope you had a great week!
Every week I dig through the noise to find the AI news and ideas that actually matter to small business owners. This week, we're talking about a side of AI that isn't nearly as exciting as the productivity gains—but is becoming increasingly important: cybersecurity.
AI is giving cybercriminals some significant advantages. They can automate more activity, move faster, and make attacks look more like normal human behavior.
CrowdStrike's latest threat hunting report found that 88% of the vulnerabilities it observed were exploited within 48 hours. It also found that activity involving AI agents generated 2.5 times more warning signs for security teams to investigate than human-driven activity.
The bottom line: the threat isn't always going to look like a hacker breaking through a wall. Sometimes it may look like a legitimate person doing something completely normal:
Someone sends an employee an email that looks like a normal request from their boss, asking them to change payment information or send sensitive information.
An attacker uses a stolen employee account to send convincing messages to other employees, gradually working their way toward someone with greater access.
A fake online identity builds trust with someone inside a company and then uses that relationship to get them to click a link, share information, or take an action they normally wouldn't.
The good news is that cybersecurity companies are adapting, too. Cloudflare just launched Adaptive Intelligence, which continuously learns from live web traffic and creates new, short-lived defenses as threats change. The idea is to make it harder and more expensive for attackers to keep trying the same techniques.
But there's an important lesson here for small businesses: "We're too small to be a target" isn't a security strategy anymore. You don't need an enterprise cybersecurity department, but you do need basic protections that make it harder for an attacker to get in—and limit what they can do if they get access.
3 Things You Can Do Now
1. Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever you can.
Especially for email, banking, accounting software, your CRM, and other systems containing sensitive information. A stolen password shouldn't be enough to get someone into your account.
2. Keep your software and devices updated.
This sounds boring. Do it anyway. The window between a vulnerability becoming known and being exploited is getting shorter. Turn on automatic updates whenever they're available, and make sure your operating system, browsers, applications, routers, and security software don't fall months behind.
3. Make your people part of your security system.
AI can make phishing emails, messages, and other social-engineering attempts more convincing. Make sure employees know not to click unexpected links, open questionable attachments, or approve unusual requests just because the message looks legitimate.
And make sure they know what to do if they accidentally click something suspicious: disconnect from the internet and report it immediately. Then have someone check the system for remote-access software or other malicious applications.
Another practical rule involves money, passwords, or sensitive information: verify before you act. If someone emails asking to change a payment account, send confidential information, or reset access, verify the request using a different method—like calling the person directly.
This Week's Takeaway
AI isn't making cybersecurity a problem only for big companies. It's changing the speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks that businesses of all sizes need to think about.
You don't need to panic, and you don't need to understand how AI-powered hacking works. But you do need to stop thinking about cybersecurity as something you set up once and forget.
The technology is changing. Your security habits need to change with it.
That's it for this week. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how AI is changing cybersecurity—and a few simple things you can do to make your business a harder target.
See you next week with more practical AI ideas
Yours in success,
Kathleen
P.S. Forward this to one business-owner friend who’s still “figuring out AI.” You’ll look like the smart one. 😊
