Small businesses are well known for the nimble and lean operations as well as solid risk management. Making quick decisions about what requires immediate attention as no risk can be prevented with 100% certainty. But researchers have found one risk that puts 60% of businesses, who encounter it out, of business. Furthermore, it is a risk almost every company will encounter. Some might already have this risk and not even know about it. Worse yet, most businesses are barely, if at all, prepared for it.
It’s the risk of a cyber-attack.
The news is filled with cybersecurity related data breaches at Equifax, T-Mobile and Netflix and similar. Also we read headlines of large Nation-to-Nation type attacks, such as the alleged Russian attacks meant to compromise the US election system. But the most frequent attack is actually against small and medium size businesses.
For innovative small companies the risk actually goes up. This is because it’s very likely that they are tapping the power of technology and the Internet. Thereby, increasing what cybersecurity experts refer to as their attack surface.
Most companies believe they already protected. They have the NextGen firewalls, secure remote access via VPNs. They have up-to-date anti-virus software and malware detection. They have trustworthy employees and besides, they haven’t been attacked… yet. And there’s the operative word, “yet.”
But an attack is going to happen especially if the prevailing attitude is that it won’t. In our consulting we are surprised to found a prevalent lack of awareness of the magnitude of cyber threats and their consequences. There is as a result some the complacency towards being proactive in managing the risk, especially among small businesses.
Research conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance found that:
- Almost 50% of small businesses have experienced a cyber attack.
- More than 70% of attacks target small businesses.
- As much as 60% of hacked small and medium-sized businesses go out of business after six months.
An interesting example is T-Mobile:
Even with previous events as dire examples and many warnings T-Mobile did not take adequate steps. So a huge bug in the company’s website allowed hackers to obtain a wealth of personal data on any customer as long as they had access to their phone number.
The gaping hole, which was first discovered by security researcher Karan Saini and reported by Motherboard, allowed access to names, email addresses, account numbers. As well as to the IMSI identifier of the phones on the subscribers’ accounts, as well as anyone who shared the account, making families especially vulnerable.
Looking further into it, we found that this T-Mobile breach was possibly related to earlier breaches in 2017 and 2015, when millions of records were stolen.
Shield is in the data protection business so we want companies to adopt better data storage and sharing solutions.
Here is where you can start and what Shield can do for you:
Please contact us today to arrange a demo of Shield-SDE and ask about a free network security assessment. Plug holes before hackers find them!
+1.855.787.7253 | sales@shield4uc.com
