The estimated income extracted by cyber criminals amounts to an estimated $1.5 trillion per year worldwide. IBM claims that the price tag that businesses have to suffer, on average, per data breach incident currently stands at $3.86 million. Despite these staggering numbers, many small-to-medium sized businesses (“SMBs”) still have a widespread, inaccurate belief that big corporations are the most vulnerable category of businesses to security breaches.
SMBs should not presume that they are shielded from cyberattacks by their comparatively smaller scale. To the contrary, hackers, rogue personnel, and others are attacking SMBs more and more because their security mechanisms are usually poorer, and in some situations, practically nonexistent. SMBs cannot afford a reactive cybersecurity posture of a wait-and-see strategy since they likely have small margins that make it much less likely that they will be able to withstand a cyber threat. Even if they do, it can take years for them to accomplish the data restoration from the breach, suffer the huge effort to reclaim customers, and persist despite the credibility loss.
In order to address these security risks, SMBs should prioritize the human aspect to security. Basic human errors are often the vulnerabilities that allow data breaches and other security issues to be perpetrated by the cyber criminals. Giving your employees the knowledge to engage in the best security practices will surely help mitigate cyber threats. According to the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Report, 25 percent of data breaches happen because of phishing attacks.
Companies should encourage security awareness by incentivizing employees’ good behavior. Creating programs where workers regularly engage in cyber-attack protection in game form will both teach while also keeping employees engaged.
Security is not just an IT concern anymore; everyone within the organization must be knowledgeable and have the desire to strengthen the security of the organization. With the current climate of business today in our world, it should fully be expected that the number of attacks will increase as more companies go remote with many of their employees working from home. Prepare your employees with a plan. Cyberattacks on SMBs are not going away anytime soon. Make a commitment to do more training of employees for their secure remote work. Want more information? More on that here.
LibertyID is the leader in identity theft restoration, having restored the identities of tens of thousands of individuals without fail. If you retain personal information on your customers, now is the time to get data breach planning and a response program in place with our LibertyID for Small Business data breach preparation program. With LibertyID Enterprise you can now add value to existing products, services, or relationships by covering your customers, employees, or members with LibertyID’s fully managed identity theft restoration service—at a fraction of our retail price—with no enrollment and no file sharing. We have no direct communication with your group members–until they need us.
Call us now for a no obligation proposal at 844-44-LIBERTY (844) 445-4237