By Joseph Steinberg, an EO New York member and CEO of Green Armor Solutions

A well-organized group of criminals recently stole $45 million by hacking into debit card systems, increasing cards’ withdrawal limits, and then using cloned debit cards to make a large number of coordinated withdrawals in two days at ATMs in 27 countries.

How was it possible for criminals to steal so much money from ATM machines in just two days? With massive amounts of security technology deployed by banks how did criminals manage to pull this crime off? And why should this be of concern to every entrepreneur and small business owner?

While there were clearly many factors that contributed to the success of the criminals, I believe that they successfully exploited four primary vulnerabilities, the sum of which provides a very important message to small business owners: