WHAT IS THE REAL COST OF A CYBERSECURITY BREACH?
The normal response would be that it is the loss of data and money. While those are the immediate tangible things that are lost, the real costs are the loss of reputation and trust with your customers, vendors, employees, and prospective customers; and potentially your entire business.
According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, 60% of small companies go out of business within six months of a cyberattack or data breach. The average recovery cost for a small business is $690,000, and for a mid-size company that jumps to $1 million.
In 2021 61% of small to mid-size businesses experienced an attack. Some of those businesses may not know for months that they were even infiltrated. Around 4000 business fall prey every day. Small and mid-size businesses feel secure in their anonymity, but are usually easy targets. Hackers know that it is a big payoff for little work. Enterprise companies invest heavily in their security, so they target smaller companies more frequently.
They can generally find networks that are easy to penetrate such as firewalls that are not appropriately configured, critical data (Bank accounts, customer data, Tax documents, employee data, etc.) stored without extra layers of protection, unsecured devices connected to the company network (printers, phones, cameras, thermostats), guests having Wi-Fi access to the company network, former employees not being removed properly from the system, and no password management plan. All these vulnerabilities are fixable by a competent IT staff.
Properly done, cybersecurity takes some monetary investment from business owners, but without it, every day is a gamble, and one your company may not survive.
To break down the numbers: In 2021, there were 32.5 million Small Businesses. 19.5 million suffered a cyberattack. 11.7 million went out of business as a result. (Cybersecurity Ventures) 25% were human error (Threatpost) 279 is the average amount of days until remediation 50% of small businesses took at least 24 hours to resume operation with more than 8 hours of downtime. (Cisco) According to Corvus Insurance, 47% of small businesses do not have a cybersecurity budget, and 42% do not have a response plan (Corvus Insurance) Almost 60% (wrongly) believe they can resolve a cybersecurity attack without a plan or process. (CNBC)
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