While individual companies might well have greater threats (war springs to mind at the moment), there is little doubt that, taken across all businesses globally, cyber crime has to be the greatest threat.
And Ginni Rometty should know – she was Chair, President and CEO of IBM until her retirement at the end of 2020.
Think about it for a moment: the threats directly to your business in the form of ransomware, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, data theft and many others. Then there are the indirect ones where a service provider, such as your ISP, is hit, affecting your ability to access your systems.
In fact, cyber attacks were projected to cause some $6 trillion in damages last year.
And, in case you think cyber crime is just a concern for big business, 43% of cyber attacks target small business, with an increase of more than 400% in small business cyber breaches in 2020, over the previous year. Not only does cybercrime cost small businesses millions of dollars a year but, even more importantly, 60% of small businesses that are victims of a cyber attack fail within six months.
And, despite some 63% of small and mid-sized businesses experiencing a data breach in 2019, less than half have a plan in place for reacting and almost two thirds have failed to react following an incident. Given that some 45% of SMBs experienced 5-16 hours of breach-related downtime and a further 12% experienced 17-48 hours of downtime, the lack of planning is a serious omission.
With research indicating email delivers almost all (94%) of the malware detected by SMBs, it’s worrying to see that less than half use commercial endpoint security protection (nearly a third of companies using a free solution and almost a further quarter using none at all), which is odd as nearly 80% say cyber security is their biggest concern with cloud.
And with less than 1 in 10 smaller businesses having cyber liability insurance, it’s clear there’s a lot to be done in terms of planning and protection – risk mitigation.
Is cyber security on your board calendar as a part of your risk review and oversight?
#BusinessFitness #Board #CyberCrime #Governance #Paranoid #Planning #Risk #Resilience #SmallBusiness #Weaknesses #QOTW
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P.S. You might also find these reports interesting:
- 30 Surprising Small Business Cyber Security Statistics (2021)
- 15 Small Business Cyber Security Statistics That You Need to Know
- Top 10 Computer Security Threats to Business IT in 2021
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