A dangerous misconception persists among small-to-mid-sized enterprises and family-run businesses: the belief that they are simply not relevant enough to be targeted. When cybercrime hits the headlines, it usually involves Fortune 500 giants, government agencies, or global banks—organizations guarding state secrets or processing billions in transactions.
In the shadow of these giants, a private company with a few decades of history can feel almost invisible. Too small to notice; too ordinary to be worth the effort.
But that feeling of invisibility is, in itself, a vulnerability. The assumption is built on a dangerous misconception — one that conflates visibility with value. It presumes that hackers operate the way marketers do, carefully segmenting their targets by brand prestige, industry influence, or public profile. It imagines a sophisticated adversary sitting at a desk, scrolling through Forbes rankings, deciding whose name is worth the effort.
Hackers do not think like entrepreneurs. They do not evaluate brand reputation or market position. They do not weigh the strategic importance of your customer base or the prestige of your industry. They think economically — and in the most ruthless, stripped-down sense of the word.
They ask one question: What is the path of least resistance to a return on investment?
And that is precisely where the real risk begins. Because the answer to that question, more often than anyone expects, points directly at businesses that believed they were too small, too quiet, or too unremarkable to be worth the trouble.
1. Hackers Do Not Look for Big Names – They Look for Entry Points
Many people carry a specific image in their minds when they think about how a cyberattack begins. They imagine a skilled and patient adversary who has chosen a single target with deliberate intent — someone sitting in a darkened room, surrounded by screens, studying one company for weeks before executing a carefully choreographed intrusion. It is a compelling image. It is also, for the vast majority of attacks, entirely wrong.
Wireless networks are another common and often underestimated entry point. If poorly configured, your business Wi-Fi can expose internal systems without you noticing. Understanding how to protect your business Wi-Fi network from hackers is therefore not optional — it is fundamental.
👉 Und verlinkst genau den Teil:
“how to protect your business Wi-Fi network from hackers”
That kind of targeted, highly personal attack does exist. But it represents a small fraction of what actually happens across the internet every single day. Most cybercriminals are not artists. They are opportunists — and opportunists do not start by asking, “Which company is the most famous?” or “Which brand will bring the most attention?” They ask a much simpler and far more practical question:
“Where can I get in easily?”
That shift in perspective changes everything. For a large portion of today’s attackers, the process of finding victims is not manual at all. It is automated, continuous, and indifferent. Sophisticated scanning tools crawl the internet around the clock, probing millions of systems every hour. These tools do not know your company name. They cannot read your website, your mission statement, or your annual revenue. They do not know whether you employ twelve people or twelve hundred. They are looking for one thing only: a weakness they can exploit.
What does that look like in practice? Automated scanners search for servers that have been misconfigured during setup — small technical errors that leave an unintended gap in your defenses. They identify software that has not been updated in months or years, carrying known vulnerabilities that were publicly disclosed long ago and never patched. They probe for open network ports that should never have been reachable from the outside world. They test login pages with lists of common passwords and credentials leaked in previous data breaches. They search for cloud storage buckets left publicly accessible by mistake. They map out entire networks, cataloging which systems are running outdated operating systems, which services are exposed, and which entry points have been left unguarded.
Think of it like fishing with an enormous net rather than a single fishing rod. The attacker is not trying to catch one specific fish. They cast the net as wide as possible, drag it through the water, and examine whatever gets caught. If your system surfaces with a detectable weakness, it enters the net along with thousands of others. Your company name was never part of the equation.
Once a vulnerable system is identified, the work simply moves to the next phase. Depending on what was found, the attacker — or in many cases, a fully automated follow-up process — may attempt to log in using stolen credentials sourced from public breach databases. They may use a known software vulnerability to establish a foothold without any credentials at all. They may test how far they can move laterally through your network once inside, searching for data they can encrypt, exfiltrate, or sell. At this stage, the original discovery is almost forgotten. What matters now is how deep they can go.
The critical point bears repeating, because it is the one that most business owners find hardest to internalize: you are not attacked because you are important. You are attacked because you are accessible.
The moment your infrastructure presents a visible weakness — an unpatched server, an exposed login page with a default password, an outdated application with a known flaw — you are no longer being evaluated as a specific company with a specific identity. You become part of a statistical population. A group of potential targets sorted not by name or revenue or reputation, but by ease of entry. And within that group, size offers no protection. A small logistics company with poor patch management can be just as exposed as a large financial institution. In some cases, more so — because smaller organizations often lack the dedicated security resources to identify and close those gaps before the scanners do.
At that point, your business may already be in a hacker’s crosshairs — often without you even realizing it.
This is why reducing your visible attack surface is not simply a best practice. It is one of the most direct and measurable ways to lower your risk. Every open port that gets closed, every outdated system that gets updated, every weak password that gets replaced with a strong one — each of these reduces the probability that an automated scanner flags your infrastructure as a target worth pursuing further.
Hackers do not look for big names. They look for open doors. And the most powerful thing any organization can do is make sure that as few of those doors as possible are left unlocked.
2. Hackers Think in Chains – Not in Single Actions
Many organizations believe that a cyberattack is one single moment. They imagine a sudden event: a system goes down, a ransom note appears, or data is stolen overnight. From the outside, it often looks like something that happened quickly. But in reality, most attacks are not single actions. They are a chain of steps.
Hackers usually follow a process. Each step prepares the next one. If you only focus on the final damage, you miss everything that happened before.
The first phase is reconnaissance. This means information gathering. Before attackers try to enter a system, they want to understand their target. They look at public LinkedIn profiles to see who works in the company and who might have access to sensitive data. They study the company website to understand its structure. They try to identify email formats, for example firstname.lastname@company.com. They analyze which technologies the company is using, such as cloud services, content management systems, or remote access solutions. All this information is often publicly available. It helps attackers plan the next step.
The second phase is initial access. This is the moment when attackers try to enter the system. They may send a phishing email to an employee. They may use a stolen password from a previous data breach. They may exploit a known vulnerability in outdated software. In many cases, the entry point is not highly technical. It is simple and effective.
Once they are inside, the third phase begins: privilege escalation. At first, the attacker may only have limited access, for example as a normal user. But limited access is often enough to continue. The attacker looks for ways to increase their rights. They try to gain administrative privileges. They search for stored credentials or misconfigurations that allow them to move to a higher level inside the system.
After that comes lateral movement. This means the attacker moves through the network. They explore other systems, servers, and departments. They search for valuable data, backup systems, financial information, or customer databases. The goal is to understand the full environment and identify the most important assets.
Finally, the last phase is monetization. This is where the attacker turns access into money. They may steal sensitive data and sell it. They may deploy ransomware and demand payment. They may sell access credentials to other criminal groups. The exact method can differ, but the goal is almost always financial gain.
It is important to understand that the objective is rarely chaos or destruction for its own sake. Most attackers are not trying to make a political statement. They are trying to control systems and generate profit. When you see an attack as a chain instead of a single event, your security strategy changes. You no longer focus only on preventing the final damage. You start asking:
How can we detect reconnaissance?
How can we block initial access?
How can we limit privilege escalation?
How can we stop lateral movement early?
Breaking one link in the chain can stop the entire attack. And that is the real advantage of understanding how hackers think.
3. Social Engineering – Why People Are Often the Weakest Link
When companies think about cybersecurity, they naturally think about technology. Firewalls, antivirus software, encryption, multi-factor authentication, secure cloud environments. These tools are important, and investing in them is absolutely the right thing to do. But here is an uncomfortable truth: many of the most successful attacks never touch any of that. They start with a conversation. Or an email. Or a phone call.
Hackers understand something that purely technical security strategies tend to overlook — that behind every protected system, there is a human being making decisions. And human beings can be manipulated in ways that no firewall can prevent. Breaking through a well-configured technical defense can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Convincing a person to open a door, however, can take less than thirty seconds. This is the domain of social engineering: the art of exploiting trust, habit, authority, and emotion rather than exploiting code.
Consider a common scenario. An employee in the finance department receives an email that appears to come from the CEO. The message is marked urgent. It requests a payment to a new supplier before the end of the day, explaining that the deal is time-sensitive and that the normal approval process should be bypassed just this once. The email looks entirely professional. The company logo is correct. The writing style feels familiar. The sender’s name matches.
Under time pressure, with an apparent authority figure waiting for a response, the employee may not stop to verify the sender address carefully. They may not notice that the domain is off by a single character. They act — because the message was designed to make them act.
In that moment, the attacker needed no technical skills whatsoever. They needed psychological understanding. This kind of attack works because it exploits dynamics that are completely normal in a healthy business environment. People want to be helpful. They respect authority. They respond to urgency. They trust communications that look familiar. Social engineers do not fight against these instincts — they rely on them entirely.
Attackers typically invest real time in preparation. They study LinkedIn to identify who works in finance, HR, or IT and what their responsibilities are. They review social media to understand communication styles and personal details that can make a message feel more authentic. They examine the company website to understand reporting structures and identify who holds decision-making authority. The more realistic the message, the higher the chance it succeeds.
Phishing remains the most widespread form of social engineering — mass emails designed to trick recipients into clicking a malicious link or downloading an infected attachment. But more targeted variants, known as spear phishing, use personalized research to create messages that feel specific and credible rather than generic. Credential harvesting takes this a step further: the attacker sends a link to a fake login page that is visually almost identical to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or another familiar platform.
The employee enters their credentials, sees a plausible error message, and moves on with their day — while the attacker quietly logs in to real systems with valid credentials. Other approaches involve pretexting: constructing an entire fictional scenario to extract information or access, whether by impersonating a supplier, an IT administrator, a colleague, or a delivery service. What all of these tactics share is a common mechanism — they are designed to make the recipient act before they think.
Remote and hybrid work has made this problem significantly harder to manage. When employees share a physical space, informal verification is easy. You can turn to a colleague and ask whether they really sent that message, or walk to a manager’s office to confirm an unusual request. That small friction stops a meaningful number of attacks. When the entire working environment moves to email, chat, and video calls, that friction disappears. Every communication arrives through the same channels an attacker would use, and the volume and pace of digital communication makes careful scrutiny harder to sustain consistently.
Technical tools can filter a large percentage of social engineering attempts before they reach an employee’s inbox. But they cannot catch everything — and they cannot control what a person does when a sophisticated, targeted message gets through. This is why security awareness training is not a nice-to-have. It is a core component of any realistic security strategy. Employees need to understand how manipulation works and why their natural instincts — helpfulness, respect for authority, responsiveness to urgency — are the specific things being exploited. They need clear, simple processes for verifying unusual requests. And they need explicit permission to slow down and push back, even when a message appears to come from someone senior.
Security culture and security technology are not alternatives. They are both necessary. Because in many cases, the easiest way into a well-protected company is not through a server. It is through an inbox.
4. Cybercrime Is a Business Model – Not Random Chaos
Many people still imagine cybercriminals as isolated individuals acting alone — unpredictable, emotional, and driven by curiosity or ego. While that image may have been closer to reality many years ago, it no longer reflects how most attacks happen today. Modern cybercrime operates like a structured business.
There are specialized roles. Some groups develop ransomware. Others focus on phishing campaigns. Some actors break into systems and sell that access to other criminals. In certain cases, there are even teams responsible for negotiating ransom payments. This division of labor makes attacks more efficient and scalable.
One well-known example is ransomware-as-a-service. In this model, experienced developers create ransomware platforms and provide them to affiliates. These affiliates use the tools to attack companies and share a portion of the ransom with the developers. The technical barrier becomes lower, but the volume of attacks increases.
In addition, there are underground marketplaces where stolen data, login credentials, and network access are traded. Access to a company network becomes a product with a price. The more valuable the data or the easier the disruption, the higher the potential return.
This means cybercrime follows economic logic. Attackers calculate effort and reward. They look for companies where entry is simple and resistance is limited. A small or medium-sized business with weak monitoring and inconsistent security policies may be more attractive than a large enterprise with strong defenses.
The goal is usually not chaos. It is monetization. Data can be sold. Systems can be encrypted. Downtime creates pressure. Pressure increases the chance of payment. When you understand cybercrime as a structured, profit-driven ecosystem, the threat becomes clearer. You are not facing random noise. You are facing organized actors who operate with financial incentives.
And financial incentives make attacks persistent. That is why systematic defense, consistent processes, and leadership awareness are essential. In a market where easy access is profitable, reducing your exposure is one of the most effective forms of protection.
5. Why Security Measures Exist – But Still Fail
Many companies feel confident about their security because they have invested in the right tools. Antivirus software is installed on every device. A firewall protects the network. Backups are running in the background. Multi-factor authentication may even be enabled for certain accounts. From a checklist perspective, everything seems to be in place. Yet time and again, companies with exactly these measures are still successfully attacked. This creates confusion and frustration. If the tools were there, why did they not prevent the breach?
The reason is simple, but often overlooked: security is not defined by the presence of tools. It is defined by how those tools are used, maintained, monitored, and enforced in daily operations. Take backups as an example. Many organizations have backup systems configured. But if those backups are never tested, no one truly knows whether they will work during an emergency. In several ransomware cases, companies discovered too late that their backups were incomplete, outdated, or connected to the same network and therefore encrypted together with the primary data. The backup existed — but it did not protect.
The same applies to multi-factor authentication. If it is optional instead of mandatory, some employees may not activate it. If it protects email accounts but not remote access systems, attackers will simply choose the weaker entry point. Security controls are only effective when they are consistently enforced across the entire environment.
Firewalls offer another example. A firewall can block malicious traffic and prevent many external threats. But if no one reviews the logs or monitors unusual behavior, attackers who manage to bypass one layer may remain undetected for weeks. Tools can generate alerts, but someone must respond to them.
Security measures also fail when internal discipline is weak. If employees reuse passwords, delay updates, or bypass policies to save time, the technical protection loses its strength. Security is not only a technical issue; it is a cultural one.
In many companies, security exists as isolated components. There is antivirus software, but no continuous monitoring. There are backups, but no incident response plan. There is a password policy written down, but no enforcement mechanism. Each element may work on its own, but the overall system lacks coordination.
Hackers, however, think in processes. They do not test one tool in isolation. They look at how different parts of your environment interact. They search for gaps between departments, between systems, and between policies and real-world behavior. They observe what happens after business hours, during holidays, or when key personnel are unavailable.
Security begins to fail when it is treated as a simple checklist rather than a living system. Buying a tool is relatively easy. Maintaining discipline, oversight, and continuous improvement is much harder. Real protection requires regular updates, clearly defined responsibilities, tested procedures, and leadership involvement. It requires asking uncomfortable questions before an incident forces them into the open.
When companies understand this difference, the focus shifts. Instead of asking, “Do we have security tools?” they begin asking, “Would our security measures actually work under pressure?” That question separates the appearance of security from real resilience.
6. A Realistic Scenario: Dan from Birmingham
Not every attacker begins with money in mind. While much of modern cybercrime follows a clear economic logic, there are situations where the driving force is far more personal. Anger. Curiosity. Ego. The need to prove something to oneself — or to the world.
In my novel, Dan is not a seasoned criminal or part of an organized ransomware group. He is a former university student who dropped out before finishing his degree. He is intelligent, technically talented, and highly curious. But he is also increasingly isolated. Over time, his curiosity turns inward. He spends long nights in front of his computer, exploring hacking forums, reading discussions, watching tutorials, and gradually immersing himself in darker corners of the internet.
At first, it is fascination. He wants to understand how systems work. How they fail. How vulnerabilities are discovered. The dark web feels mysterious and powerful — a hidden layer of the internet where knowledge circulates without filters. What begins as technical interest slowly turns into something deeper. The line between learning and experimenting starts to blur. The real turning point, however, is personal.
After a painful breakup with his girlfriend from Berlin, Dan feels rejected and powerless. Instead of dealing with the loss in a healthy way, he withdraws further into the digital world. In that space, he does not feel vulnerable. He feels capable. In control. The more he learns about weaknesses in systems, the more he experiences a sense of regained power.
He does not choose a global corporation as his target. He does not look for political relevance or media attention. He selects a medium-sized company in Germany for a much simpler reason: it appears reachable. The company has exposed services. Certain systems respond to basic scanning tools. Login portals exist that do not enforce strong authentication. Dan begins carefully.
He scans for vulnerabilities and analyzes responses from publicly accessible systems. He identifies outdated software versions. He tests login portals using credential combinations leaked in previous data breaches. What started as theoretical knowledge becomes practical action.
The company he targets is not chaotic or careless. It operates normally. Employees work productively. Security tools exist. But security is not consistently enforced. Monitoring is limited. Multi-factor authentication is optional in some areas. Logs are not regularly reviewed. The systems are functional — but not hardened. Dan eventually finds an entry point.
He enters quietly, without triggering immediate alarms. At first, he only observes. He navigates through directories, reads internal emails, and explores shared drives. He learns how the company communicates. He sees customer information, internal documents, and operational processes. The access gives him a sense of control he lacks in his personal life. The digital environment becomes a place where he can influence something, where he is no longer powerless. But curiosity rarely remains neutral.
Over time, observation turns into escalation. He extracts data to see whether he can. He modifies small elements to test system reactions. Eventually, he disrupts operations. Not because he needs money. Not because he is part of a criminal enterprise. But because he wants proof — proof that he can cause real-world consequences.
The company suddenly faces disruptions it cannot immediately explain. Data is missing. Systems behave strangely. Internal trust is shaken. What seemed like a stable and routine environment reveals hidden weaknesses under pressure.
This fictional scenario highlights an important reality. Not every attacker fits the organized, profit-driven model. Some are motivated by revenge, curiosity, or the desire for validation. Their actions may not follow a strict business plan — but they can be just as damaging.
The company in Germany was not a symbolic target. It did not appear in headlines before the incident. It was not chosen for its importance. It was chosen because it was accessible. Dan did not attack because the company was powerful. He attacked because he found an open door — and because he wanted to see if he could walk through it.
From a defensive perspective, the lesson does not change. Whether the motive is profit, revenge, curiosity, or ego, the technical entry points are often identical: weak passwords, exposed services, missing monitoring, inconsistent enforcement of policies. The motive may differ. The vulnerability rarely does. And that is why resilience cannot depend on guessing who might attack. It must depend on reducing the opportunities that allow anyone — regardless of motive — to succeed.
7. How to Start Thinking Like an Attacker
After understanding how attack chains develop and how different motives can lead to the same technical outcome, many leaders ask a practical question: what should we actually do differently? The first step is not buying another security product. It is changing perspective.
Most organizations think defensively. They focus on protecting their systems from the inside. They install tools, define policies, and hope that these measures will stop threats at the perimeter. But attackers do not think from the inside out. They think from the outside in. They look at your company as a potential opportunity. They search for gaps, shortcuts, and blind spots. To strengthen your security, you need to temporarily step into that external viewpoint.
This does not mean learning how to hack or experimenting with attack techniques. It means asking honest and sometimes uncomfortable questions. If someone knew nothing about your company and had only thirty minutes to research online, what would they discover? Could they identify key decision-makers on LinkedIn? Would they learn your email format from your website? Do job postings reveal which software, cloud services, or security tools you use?
Public information often provides more insight than companies expect. Attackers use this data to craft convincing phishing emails and to understand how your organization operates. Next, consider your access points. If someone wanted to enter your environment today, where would they start? Through remote access tools? Through email accounts? Through cloud storage? Through a smaller supplier connected to your systems? Many breaches begin with third parties because attackers choose the weakest link in the chain.
Detection is equally important. If an account logged in at an unusual time from another country, would anyone notice? If large volumes of data were downloaded outside normal working hours, would that trigger an alert? Attackers often succeed not because defenses are completely absent, but because suspicious activity goes unnoticed for too long.
Privilege management is another critical area. Do employees have access only to what they truly need? Are administrative rights limited and regularly reviewed? Are accounts of former employees deactivated immediately? Excessive privileges make lateral movement easier once an attacker gains initial access.
Finally, think about response readiness. If a ransomware incident occurred tomorrow morning, who would take control? Is there a clear and tested incident response plan? Are backups verified and separated from the main network? Does management understand its role during a crisis?
Thinking like an attacker also means understanding pressure. Attackers rely on urgency and fear. They know that businesses cannot tolerate long downtime. Preparation reduces that pressure and removes leverage. This mindset shift is not about paranoia. It is about clarity.
When leadership regularly asks these questions, security becomes proactive instead of reactive. The conversation moves from “We have the right tools” to “Where are our real weaknesses?” The focus shifts from isolated products to connected processes.
You begin to see your organization from the outside. You see what is visible, what is exposed, and what is predictable. And once you see it clearly, you can strengthen it. Thinking like an attacker does not weaken your organization. It makes it more resilient. Because resilience does not begin with technology. It begins with awareness, discipline, and honest evaluation.
Behind the Backdoor reveals the true methods of modern hackers – quiet, inconspicuous, and frighteningly skillful. Based on real cases, including well-known German ransomware attacks, this book tells gripping stories from the world of cybercrime: social engineering, fake loans, weak passwords, USB spoofing, compromised browsers, and overwhelmed IT teams.
It reads like a captivating novel – yet delivers clear, immediately applicable security measures for everyday life. Each story illustrates how attacks actually begin and which small decisions can cause major damage.
This is not a technical manual—and not a fictional thriller in the classic sense. It is a guided descent into the grey zone where everyday business life meets modern cybercrime. The book connects human psychology, organizational blind spots, and real attack patterns into a coherent picture that explains why so many incidents succeed despite security tools, policies, and awareness training. For entrepreneurs, freelancers, and anyone who wants to understand how hackers think – and how to effectively protect themselves in just a few steps.
Conclusion: How hackers think and attack small businesses
Understanding how hackers think and attack small businesses changes the entire perspective on cybersecurity. Attacks are rarely about fame or company size. They are about accessibility. If systems are easy to enter, poorly configured, or weakly monitored, a business becomes an attractive target — regardless of its revenue or reputation.
Most cyberattacks follow a clear process. Attackers gather information, gain initial access, expand their privileges, move through the network, and finally turn that access into money. This chain is structured and economically driven. It is not random.
For small businesses, the real risk is not being specifically chosen. The real risk is being exposed and unprepared.
The good news is that this chain can be broken. Strong password policies, enforced multi-factor authentication, limited user privileges, tested backups, and active monitoring significantly reduce the chances of a successful attack. Just as important is awareness at the leadership level. Security is not only an IT task — it is a strategic responsibility.
When you begin to see your organization from an attacker’s perspective, your decisions change. You stop asking whether you are too small to be attacked and start asking where your weaknesses might be. That shift in thinking is the foundation of real resilience.
