As a smaller organization you might not think that cyber criminals really care about infiltrating your network. After all, you’re not a billion-dollar enterprise, you don’t deal with government work, top-secret contracts, or financial institutions, what interest would they have in you?
In recent years, however, that thought process has been changing, and small business owners are coming to understand what cyber threats would mean if they should fall victim to an attack.
According to Cyber Defense Magazine, 43% of all cyber attacks are aimed at small businesses.
If you lean toward the former thought process, here are a couple things you may want to consider:
Cyber Criminals Think Differently
While you might not see the value in them targeting your organization, they just see a potential victim. With ransomware being one of the major attacks (holding systems hostage for payment), they either seek a financial benefit, or simply seek to destroy your company.
Can you afford to pay the ransom (if you do)? Can you afford and deal with a complete rebuild if you don’t? Can your company make it through the down time in either instance?
According to the experts on our recent cybersecurity webinar, ransomware attacks leave companies down for an average of 16 days.
That’s 16 days without being operational – that’s half a month!
Again, it’s not what your systems and operations are necessarily worth to them, it’s dependent on what they’re worth to you.
You Might Not Be The End Target
By infiltrating your systems, bad-actors can then connect with other organizations – your customers or suppliers, for instance – with a higher probability of infiltrating their systems. This could not only damage your reputation, but also open you to being held liable for damages they incur.
In that same Cyber Defense article mentioned above, data breaches can take up to a half a year to detect. That means those nefarious actors are able to do damage for months before they’re even found out.
Cyber Security Solutions for Small Businesses
If cyber security isn’t something you’ve looked into before, or you feel you might be falling short in that area, there are a number of ways we can help.
Whether it’s our cyber security solutions or vCISO services, let’s start with a conversation. Book an IT consultation here.