When starting a small business, the last thing on your mind is probably fending off hackers and cyber criminals. You're not alone. Many businesses believe their data is safe--but don't have security policies in place.

Seventy-seven percent of small business owners in the U.S. think their company is safe from cyber criminals, according to a recent study conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec. However, 83% said they don't have a cyber security plan in place.

Cyber threats can come from outside organizations, or from within companies when an employee or ex-employee steals data. Small business owners take on a different set of risks when they accept debit and credit card payments over the Internet, said Ellen Richey, chief enterprise risk officer for Visa, Inc. Richey said businesses can be the target of thieves attempting to steal information from their systems, or they can be fooled indirectly when fraudsters steal information from a different merchant and use that information to make purchases.

Consumers also can be at risk, especially if they are posting information on social networks. Cyber criminals can use the information that is publicly available to socially engineer their way into the consumer's account, said Richey.

Richey gave 5 tips for establishing a cyber security policy:

"We at Visa want to make security important to small businesses by getting data out of their system," Richey said, by moving to a dynamic data system. That way, even if a cyber criminal stole a card number, the person still couldn't use it to commit fraud.

"If we had that fully in place that would reduce the opportunity to commit fraud because small businesses wouldn't have valuable data anymore. In the future, only the big aggregators of data--like Visa itself--will have vulnerable data," Richey said.

As more consumers begin making payments with Square and new mobile forms of payment, Richey said, it produces new types of risks.

"At a high level, the challenges are technical. Mobile phones aren't a secure, payment system--payment information needs to be in a segregated section of the phone; it can't be in the same space as any old application that a consumer can download. The other is an environmental challenge. Unlike a traditional terminal, a mobile phone is traveling all over the place and can be lost or fall into the wrong hands," Richey said.

That said, the mobile phone also presents an opportunity to become more secure, she added. For instance, using near field communications (NFC) technology in the phone to make payments is much more secure than depending on the magnetic strip on a credit card. Many Android and Windows Phones support NFC, but Apple chose not to include it in the iPhone 5.

Beyond education and awareness of small business owners, technology can help close the gap in security and payment systems. For instance, Intel recently announced a partnership with Mastercard that will implement PayPass NFC technology in its Ultrabooks, allowing users to make online payments by tapping a card or their phone on their ultrabook. Also, Facebook has a system that allows you to use two devices for authentication. If only the payment systems would catch up to this.

The pieces to solve the identification problem are out there. All that's left is putting the pieces together.