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Surprise: Small Businesses Not Immue to Cybercrime

July 29, 2008

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) represent a major engine for economic growth. Globally, SMBs account for 99% of business numbers and 40% to 50% of GDP. A recent study by McAfee revealed some surprising cybersecurity facts about SMBs:

• Over half of them believe that they are not large enough to be a target of cybercriminals.
• Fewer than half of them understand the importance of information security in their business.
• Almost a third of them have been attacked more than four times in the last three years.
• About thirty percent of the attacks on SMBs took a week or more to recover from.
• Almost half of the SMBs believe that the default settings on their hardware and software are adequate to protect them from cyber attacks.
• SMBs only spend an average of one hour a week on information security.

The authors of the report stress that many of the beliefs revealed in the study are erroneous: SMBs are a juicy target for cybercriminals, most SMBs do not have the resources to survive a major cyberattack, and default settings are definitely not adequate to protect against cyberattacks. If you are involved in an SMB, you might want to take this study to heart.

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