A cyberattack can paralyze critical infrastructure and businesses and create negative pressure. In other cases, this can lead to litigation between you and your company. These and other factors, can seriously harm a company and force many of them to pay for data recovery and computer security services to repair the damage.
However, many companies never managed to recover and are more likely to go bankrupt. In this article, we examine the data underlying this trend and explain why cyber-attacks can kill your business.
The difficult data
About two-thirds of all cyber-attacks target small and medium-sized businesses, up from 40% in 2015. In fact, they usually do not have the resources that large companies to do. One study found that there are about four thousand cyber-attacks against small businesses every day. About 60% of small businesses have stopped operations after a cyber-attack. One of the problems with small businesses is that they are considered an easy target for hackers.
Every organization have some kind of Internet security breach in the last twelve months. The problem is so strong that about 80% of all social security numbers have been hacked at least once. Well, hackers have no reason to slow down their activity because cybercrime is a business worth billions of dollars.
Why a Cyberattack Can Kill a Small Business
As a business owner, your data is your asset. If you cannot honor customer’s order or access patient records, you may not be able to serve customers. The loss of financial information may allow hackers to charge your bank account or charge all credit cards to your customers. And for that, you have to pay in different ways.
Critical cyberattacks can also impact your brand and will make you lose confidence in your business. Many businesses gives up because their income has dropped in addition to the cost of cyberattacks.
One researcher found that small businesses paid about $ 700,000 to hackers in order to clean up their businesses. For medium-sized businesses, the amount was greater than $ 1 million. Many small businesses simply cannot spend such huge money to stay in business.
If they are to remove existing resources from profitable projects to repair the damage, they are strangling their core business. It’s just a slower death because hackers have deleted your database and you have no backup.
Solutions for Small Businesses
To minimize the risks, create an emergency plan so that you know what to do immediately if you know that your systems have been compromised. Run a business continuity plan so that you can continue to work when critical systems or resources are at risk.
Don’t let cyber-protection be just the responsibility of your IT department, because you can’t afford to ignore the human element. Train all of your employees. Basic training can stop many low-level threats like clicking on a malware link or attachment in a phishing email. For example, teaching people to delete the suspicious message if in doubt can stop many attempts to steal information. However, this isn’t enough and other solutions have to be implemented to safeguard your business.
Train all your employees. Basic training can block many low-level threats, such as clicking on a malicious link or a phishing email attachment. Don’t let computer security simply be a responsibility of your IT department, because you can’t afford to ignore the factor. Training your employees how to avoid the suspicious message in case of doubt can prevent many attempts to steal information. However, this is not enough and to protect your company you need to implement other solutions.
Unless you have the right protections, having too many devices connected to your network is just an impending tragedy. Get a qualified IT team on board, or outsource your work to a reliable IT team that can implement this type of strategy for you.
Think about cyber insurance. It is essentially an insurance policy that pays when you are the victim of a cyberattack. Although premiums may seem high, the risk disappears. An added benefit of these strategies is that they ensure you can engage the best IT security experts to restore your systems and keep update your systems and network.
Assign a dedicated processor to encrypt your sensitive files, and they will do it using device resources to encrypt and decrypt the data. In any case, this means that the stolen files are incomprehensible to those who do not have the key or password to decode them.
Hackers are turning to small businesses and small businesses are paying a heavy price for this. You can take steps to protect your business from cyber attack and minimize the damage if you are hit. You cannot afford to do what you do and I hope hacker never touch your systems.
Related Resources:
How to Protect Mid-Tier Enterprises from Cyberattacks in 2019