Small Business Cybersecurity Statistics You Should Know

Small businesses, similar to all enterprises, have to manage customer data. This includes PII, which means personally identifiable Information. They are often not equipped to protect their data from cyberthreats. They are easy targets for state-sponsored and scripted criminals. That’s why cybersecurity is crucial.

Even amateur cyber criminals are aware of the likelihood that they will find a user who will fall for the phishing email, or an employee with a default password or obvious password. This is especially true in small businesses where cybersecurity training and employee awareness are often neglected in the hope that bad actors won’t be too busy hunting big-game hunters.

Small businesses can also be negligent when it comes to network security. They leave equipment with default passwords and don’t implement WPA2/WPA3 protection. Small businesses are also less likely to follow cybersecurity best practices such as strong passwords, frequent changes, patch management, principle of least privilege and revoking access when not needed.

Small businesses are at risk

Small businesses are most at risk from social engineering. This is mainly through phishing scams. Attackers can trick innocent users into giving out sensitive or confidential information or clicking on malicious files or links that contain malware. IT support professionals working with small businesses are increasingly concerned about ransomware and double-extortion attacks.

Sometimes it isn’t advanced threats that cause incidents, but little things like an employee leaving a sticky with his credentials on a desk. This can expose the entire system and lead to a variety of threats.

The Covid-19 crisis highlighted 2020 as a year marked by cyberattacks that leverage vulnerabilities in hastily created work-from-home deployments. After global lockdowns, small businesses were most at risk.

Security was often neglected in the quest for continuity. Many small businesses let employees access their internal resources from their personal devices, blurring the lines between business and personal devices. Smaller companies that have limited IT resources and staff had to deal with this large-scale, unplanned work-from-home experiment.

Cybersecurity Statistics for Small Business Owners

It is important to keep up with current cyber-attack statistics in order to understand the state of cyber threats and commonly used vulnerabilities. This will also help you to identify the implications of successful cyberattacks and how to mitigate them.

Here are 10 critical cybersecurity statistics that will help you see the lack of preventative and combative actions in small businesses despite modern cyber attacks.

1. 43% of data breaches are small- and medium-sized businesses.
2. If you are still unsure about your small business being a victim of cyberattacks, 61% have reported at least 1 in the past year.
3. A CISCO benchmark study found that 40% of small businesses were affected by a serious cyber attack and had to go offline for at least eight hours. This downtime is a significant cost in a security breach.
4. Ransomware was not one of the top cyberthreats small businesses identified in the CISCO study. MSPs may underestimate the threat of ransomware for business owners, but they aren’t. Ransomware is a concern for 85 percent of MSPs.
5. 30 percent of small businesses believe phishing attacks as the biggest cyber threat.
6. 83% of small- and medium-sized companies aren’t financially ready to recover from cyber attacks.
7. 91% of small businesses don’t have cyber liability insurance, despite the staggering statistics. This demonstrates how unprepared small businesses are to deal security breaches.
8. Only 14% of small business owners consider their cyber attack mitigation and risk mitigation abilities highly effective.
9. 43% of SMBs don’t have a cybersecurity plan.
10. One fifth of small businesses does not use endpoint protection, and 52% of SMBs don’t have IT security specialists in-house.

Moving forward: What is required?

These statistics show the dire cybersecurity situation for small businesses. While it is true that advanced cybersecurity tools, techniques and expertise are not cheap, the cost of a successful hack can be enough to take a small business out of business. It may appear that you are either damned to do it or damned not to.

Small businesses should try to cut costs wherever possible. If you don’t have the budget for security personnel, consider hiring an MSSP or MSP with security features like SpartanTec in Charleston SC. You can make a big difference by taking small steps. Focus on what is essential to survive in a complex threat environment. Even the most basic cybersecurity practices can greatly reduce the risk.

Here are some tips to improve your cybersecurity without spending a fortune:

• Most people fall for social engineering tactics that lack cybersecurity awareness. Your employees should be educated about common social engineering tactics, conduct phishing assessments and reinforce basic cybersecurity concepts.
• Make sure your OSes, apps, and security software such as antivirus and firewalls are up-to-date.
• Use multi-factor authentication and enforce password policies.
• Secure remote access to internal resources and encrypted data transfer with a VPN.
• DHS offers free scanning and cybersecurity assessments for small businesses in order to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. These services can be leveraged.
• Cyber liability insurance is available.
• In case of ransomware and other malware attacks, always have an offline backup of your data.
• Security incidents are bound to happen, even if you do everything right. It is best to prepare for these incidents with an effective incident response plan. An IR plan isn’t a one-and done project. To stay on top of evolving threats, your IR plan must be regularly updated and tested.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now if you need help in boosting your company’s cyber security measures.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Charleston, SC 29407
843-418-4792
https://manageditservicescharleston.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence, Charleston