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Cybersecurity Facts for Small Businesses to Know in 2021

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Alex Benjamin
Cybersecurity Facts for Small Businesses to Know in 2021

Cyber attacks on all organizations, but especially on small and medium-sized firms, are growing increasingly common, targeted, and complicated. According to Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study, small firms are targeted by 43% of all reported cyberattacks, yet just 14% are equipped to protect themselves.

A cyber attack not only disrupts routine operations but may also inflict damage to critical IT assets and infrastructure, which may be hard to recover from without the necessary cash or resources. As a result, small firms are finding it difficult to protect themselves.

The most common types of attacks on small businesses include phishing/social engineering, compromised/stolen devices, and credential theft.

Here is a list of facts that every small business owner around the world must be aware of:

  • We aren’t lying when we say hackers were active last year. Hacking incidents against small firms climbed five-fold in 2020, according to Fundera. These sorts of assaults increased by 424% in total. Why would hackers choose smaller firms with less money to pay ransoms as their target? Continue reading to find out.
  • While most big firms are becoming more conscious of the dangers of cyber-attacks, many small businesses continue to bury their heads in the sand. According to a survey conducted by BullGuard in 2020, a third of the firms with 50 or fewer workers use free consumer-grade cybersecurity to defend themselves.
  • One out of every five of these businesses had no endpoint security. It’s no surprise that hackers are increasingly focusing their efforts on small businesses. Hackers, like animals in the wild, go after the weakest connections. Small companies are the easiest victims right now.
  • Despite the significant growth in cyberattacks on small firms and the terrible effects of such an assault, most small businesses still believe it will never happen to them. BullGuard polled 60% of small company owners who believed their organizations were unlikely targets for hackers.
  • The average cost of an insider threat to small firms (500 people or fewer) was $7.68 million, according to IBM and the Ponemon Institute’s The Cost of Insider Threats Global Report 2020.
  • According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, 60% of all businesses go out of business within six months of being attacked by a data breach. Because this study was conducted in 2015, it’s likely that the numbers have climbed since then.
  • Phishing was the most common behavior in small business data breaches, according to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report

Scary? It definitely is. But — yes, luckily there is a ‘but’ — you can avoid being phished and spoofed and save yourself and your business a lot of money and data. How? Well, stay up to date with the latest email authentication protocols such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. Never heard these words before? Worry not. Head to EmailAuth right now to learn all about these and secure your domain before the next cyber attacker comes knocking.

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Alex Benjamin
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