- Norton’s new monitoring functions arrive during a record increase in infractions
- Dark web forums are increasingly confidential commercial identifiers with alarming speed
- The scams of social networks multiply, they hit small businesses where the reputation is fragile
Small businesses face an increasingly difficult environment, with financial and reputation threats that arise from unexpected addresses.
The attackers are becoming more precise in how they are aimed at smaller organizations and individual influential people who often lack the best protection of ransomware or business level defenses.
According to Norton, cyber infractions aimed at small businesses increased more than 50% in 2025, and exposure to data in general increased 21% quarter to quarter.
Small businesses are increasingly trapped in the sight of cybercrime
“Today, small businesses are objectives like everyone else, and need the right tools to help protect them from very real threats,” said Deval Patel, head of small companies in Gen.
To address this, Norton has expanded its security package to address two main weak points: stolen commercial data that circulate on the dark website and fraudulent activity in social networks accounts.
The new version adds a broader coverage for information that could be easily used against a business once exposed.
Its characteristic of “dark web monitoring” now scan for eight additional fields beyond personal details, including the company’s name, fiscal identification number and VAT numbers.
If any of these identifiers appears in underground forums or markets, the owners receive an alert.
For companies that consider a dark web VPN to protect the activity, it is clear that monitoring only is not a complete solution, but a piece of a larger security puzzle.
“… By adding improved monitoring of the dark website and social networks along with our financial monitoring function, we are expanding the tranquility of the areas where cyber threats are growing faster,” Patel added.
The idea is to give small businesses the opportunity to react before criminals exploit the data for fraud or supplantation.
While this expansion sounds reassuring, it depends largely on how fast information appears online compared to Norton’s detection speed.
The second addition occurs through “social networks monitoring”, which focuses on the commercial profiles of Facebook and Instagram.
Norton states that the system can point out signs of account acquisition, malicious links and suspicious behavior before the account owner realizes.
For small businesses that depend on these platforms for visibility or sales, early warnings could reduce financial loss and reputation damage.
This type of protection also reaches the influencers, which depend on their online presence to maintain associations and audience confidence.
Given the increase in documented scams in the threat report of the second quarter, particularly fraudulent ads and false support schemes, social networks management is increasingly linked to cyber security instead of just the brand or marketing.
Norton’s expansion shows that even very small companies now face risks once limited to large corporations.
However, the effectiveness of these tools will depend on the speed of the real world, precision and if the owners treat alerts as processable signals instead of the background noise.
