JOPLIN, Mo. — When you think of a cyber attack, you might think of major companies being victims. But the same thing can happen to small businesses. Preventing that from happening was the purpose of an event, Tuesday, at Missouri Southern.

The conference room inside the SBDC Center in Joplin became a classroom on Tuesday. It was the location of a virtual training session on data security.

The virtual event featured a member of the Missouri Office of Homeland Security as well as Jason Rincker, with Stronghold Data, who says small business owners are frequent targets of hackers.

Jason Rincker, Stronghold Data, said, “Share with them the knowledge we’ve gained, you know, over the years, cyber threats, the whole cyber landscape is a major threat to all industries, both federal, city, state, you know from a government standpoint but also from small businesses, in fact, small businesses are their number one target.”

Ken Surbrugg with the Small Business & Development Center on the campus of MSSU says data security is an issue you should deal with before you go into business.

Ken Surbrugg, Consultant, MSSU Small Business Development Center, said, “It’s an expense your going to have but think of it also as an investment in your business because protecting data is so important in today’s world.”

He says small businesses often don’t have the financial resources to overcome an information breach, which can hurt owners and employees.

“Everything else is going great with the business, they have a good market and potential and everything else, but if that happens, you know, how many people are going to be confident and secure that they can continue to do business with them, or yeah, it just shuts them down and it’s unfortunate because that’s lost jobs in our community.”