Listen to this article
The numbers are dire and frightening. Of all the cyberattacks committed annually, small businesses account for 43%, and 46% are on small businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees.
As small businesses start using more advanced technologies and rely more on the cloud, that same technology can make them more vulnerable to attacks. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses on average lose approximately $25,000 annually to cybercrime. In 2020 alone, small businesses were the target of more than 700,000 attacks, which caused a total of $2.8 billion in damages, according to an Accenture Cybercrime study released recently.
Thanks to the astronomical growth of artificial intelligence capabilities and the constantly changing nature of these attacks, the problem isn’t going away. In fact, it’s only going to get worse, but there are steps small businesses and businesses of any size can take to reduce the danger.
What are the threats?
Accenture predicts that businesses will see a 15% increase in cybercrime costs by 2025. Elaine Dodd, vice president of the fraud division at the Oklahoma Bankers Association, saw this coming 20 years ago.
“It was a joke when I started up there 20 years ago that I’ll work myself out of a job, but when the internet really kicked in with a surge, it offered an opportunity for criminals to hit everybody,” Dodd said. “So, our small businesses get hit. Every single day.”
While many think of data breaches when it comes to cyberattacks, the majority of crimes are business email compromise, which is a type of phishing attack that targets organizations with the goal of stealing money or critical information. The other common crime is vendor email compromise, which is a subset of business email compromise attacks in which the hacker impersonates a ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
