Cyber Attacks have been rapidly increasing these days due to the enhancement of advanced technology. Many are facing such attacks that are leading to greater financial loss. With this cyber attacks, most of the people are suffering a lot including SMBs. SMBs are the Small and Medium Businesses who are dropping due to massive cyber attacks. A study has been conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, which stated that the amount of financial loss undergone by small and medium businesses due to cyber-attacks has been growing rapidly.
According to the study, the security group found that, in the year 2015, SMBs are financially losing $38,000 on an average from one cyber incident. The small business owners are spending an enormous amount to get rid of cyber attacks and losses induced by downtime. Small to medium businesses (SMBs) are dropping victims to cyber attacks as hackers increasingly use point of sale (PoS) malware and sophisticated exploit kits to remove sensitive data.
Increased Cyber Attacks Leading to Financial Loss for SMBs
The major priorities of small business owners are market penetration and financial stability. Hence, they pay less or no attention towards information security and completely focusses on generating revenues. As a result, their abandoned IT infrastructure becomes a prime target for cyber-criminals. In fact, large businesses adopt better security technologies while the SMBs have weaker security that eventually results in a goal by the cyber criminals.
Last year, a study found that around a third of small and medium businesses experienced downtime by which they missed pretty good business opportunities. Among those, 88 per cent of them had to shift to third-party experts for help. On average, ultimately they accounted for about $11,000 of a company’s expenses. According to the respondents, the small business owners lost profits and accounted for $16,000. Even they faced reputational losses that affected the company’s image. This reputational loss was estimated at more than $8,000.
SMBs Financial Losses
Once a small business come across some cyber attack, they need to suffer a lot to recover them. The small and medium businesses need to spend an enormous amount for recover the damages caused by the cyber incidents. They need to pay for the following:
- For calling in specialists to clear up the after-effects.
- Huge Loss due to missed business opportunities.
- Losses Caused by Downtime.
Every small or medium business encounters the risk of incurring this huge scale of loss. The recent study conducted by the Kaspersky Labs shows that almost all organisations (probably 90 percent) were restrained to external threats at least once during the year. Some others, 73 percent of respondents, confronted internal threats like software vulnerabilities or the danger of employees losing mobile devices or causing information leaks.
Cyber Incidents Costs Too High!
Cyber incidents happen to most of the small and medium businesses, and the business owners need to suffer huge financial losses for recovering the cyber attack. Recovery of cyber attacks costs too high. One of the key reasons for the high cost of cyber incidents is the fact that, if the attacks are not restricted, eventually the cyber criminals acquire access to sensitive corporate information. More than a third (39 per cent) of small scale companies stated that they have lost confidential data as a result of a cyber-attack.
Safety Measures for SMBs
Konstantin Voronkov, Head of Endpoint Product Management, Kaspersky Lab has given some suggestions to the small and medium business owners for protecting their companies from the massive cyber attacks. When launching a the latest venture, entrepreneurs need to contemplate cautiously their investment and every aspect that could affect the company’s profit and reputation. Every automation of business processes purely associated with information security risks. The business owners need to keep this in mind and follow the rules accordingly.
Voronkov also strongly recommend thinking about the company’s information security in advance instead suffering the potential losses. SMBs need to ensure that staff are provided with basic cyber security training to increase awareness of these threats. One most important measure is to create user awareness and education training about being safe online through which you can prevent the numbers of attacks.