As large organizations realize the likelihood of cyber attacks and improve their cyber readiness, small businesses are seeing increases not experienced by their larger counterparts.
If I was to tell you that cyber attacks typically focus on larger businesses, you’d likely agree. After all, it just makes sense that the smaller the business, the likelihood that a cybercriminal’s earnings would be smaller. But, according to U.K. cyber insurer Hiscox’s Cyber Readiness Report 2023, it appears that there are plenty of cybercriminals that are likely targeting small businesses.
According to the report, in three years time, the proportion of organizations with less than ten employees that experienced a cyber attack rose from 23% to 36% - that’s more than a 50% increase!
And the cost of these attacks is nothing to sneeze at. The median cost of a cyber attack for a small business (up to 250 employees) – whether partially or completely successful – was around $8,000. To threat actors, that’s a material amount of money. Putting this in perspective, the median cybersecurity spend for small businesses is just over $55K – and this spend has three out of five organizations (61%) with fewer than 250 employees feeling confident in their cyber security readiness.
But given the potential for an even greater impact from a cyber attack – up to and including shutting down a business – it makes sense that small businesses continue to improve their defenses against an attack, including shoring up their user’s role in stopping attacks through continual security awareness training.
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