Abstract

Small businesses face increasing cybersecurity risks yet often lack the financial resources, technical expertise, and dedicated IT personnel required to protect their systems effectively. The Windows Security Toolkit for Small Business was designed to bridge this gap by automating the detection of common security misconfigurations and system vulnerabilities that often go unaddressed in a small business environment. Using Python for the graphical user interface (GUI) and PowerShell to automate system security scanning to address firewall status, current Windows updates, user account control settings, password policy, and disabling venerable services this toolkit provides recommendations to non-technical users in an easy-to-understand format. Research on cybersecurity issues for small businesses, product testing across multiple Windows environments, and user feedback was used to debug and refine the toolkit. The result was a prototype that demonstrated an effective and practical solution that improves system security for small organizations while addressing cost constraints.