Most breaches don't start with an exotic zero-day exploit. They start with something ordinary: a reused password, an unpatched server, a convincing email. Growing businesses are especially exposed because security tooling and processes often lag behind how fast the business itself is scaling.
Phishing and business email compromise remain the most common entry point by a wide margin — attackers don't need to break encryption if they can just ask an employee to click a link or approve a fraudulent payment. Credential stuffing is close behind: reused passwords from unrelated breaches get tried against business logins at scale, automatically.
Unpatched and misconfigured systems are the next big category — an exposed admin panel, a cloud storage bucket left public, or a server running months-old software with known vulnerabilities. These aren't sophisticated attacks; they're opportunistic ones, found by automated scanners rather than a person specifically targeting you.
Ransomware continues to evolve too — modern operators often steal data before encrypting it, so paying (or restoring from backup) doesn't make the exposure risk go away. And third-party risk is growing: a vendor or contractor with access to your systems is effectively part of your attack surface, whether you've accounted for that or not.
None of this requires a massive security budget to address meaningfully. Multi-factor authentication, timely patching, least-privilege access, and basic employee awareness training close off the large majority of these paths — the highest-leverage work is rarely the most expensive.