What do Bill Gates, Michelle Obama and Kim Kardashian have in common — besides being household names? Each is a recent victim of a vicious cyber attack. The growing frequency and severity of cyber attacks in the past months has proven that even billionaires, celebrities, big banks and businesses are not immune to hacking.

“There is no business that is completely safe on the internet,” says Walter Halicki, CEO of online reputation protection company JW Maxx Solutions. “Not even large corporations like Facebook can escape the cyber criminals constantly improving and re-purposing their sophisticated programs and tools which they use to gain illegal access to information stored in hard drives and servers.”

But unlike high profile victims, small business owners cannot afford to devote unlimited financial and human resources to fixing the breach and doing damage control. A single website hack can be devastating to a small business, resulting in a loss of customer confidence and revenue that can take years to rebuild.

Google has launched a portal that offers free help and advice for small business owners in the event their website is compromised. The “Help for hacked sites” portal provides short videos with step-by-step directions on how to recover from a hacking event and how to protect a site from future attacks.

With e-commerce stronger than ever, Google hopes to empower business owners with a better understanding of how to protect themselves from cyber attacks. “Just as you focus on making a site that’s good for users and search-engine friendly,” Maily Ohye, a Google Developer Programs Tech Lead writes on a blog accompanying the help portal, “keeping your site secure — for you and your visitors — is also paramount.”

The FBI estimates that cyber attacks cost businesses billion of dollars every year.

Sources:

Eha, Brian Patrick. “Google’s New Portal Provides Help for Hacked Sites,” Entrepreneur. March 13, 2013.

Ohye, Maile. “New first stop for hacked site recovery,” Google. March 12, 2013.

PRWeb. “Online Reputation Protection Company, JW Maxx Solutions Shares Information on Computer Hackers as They Gain Momentum,” PRWeb.com. Feb. 25, 2013.