SMBs Believe In Their Immunity To Cyber Crime

Last year, over half of SMBs surveyed in an Applied Research telephone survey for Symantec reported that they did not consider their business a “possible target for cyber attacks.” Though most small business owners are aware of the types of threats that are out there, a business’s small size can lull its owners into a false sense of security. Even if you’re not a huge corporation with vast assets for hackers to pursue, cyber criminals can still profit from your data, or at least wreak havoc in your system.

 

Every business has sensitive data that they want to protect, and are indeed obliged by law to protect. If you store any information about your clients, then you need to make sure it’s safe. Your clients entrust you with their information with the expectation that it will be kept secure and private. There’s a reason that larger companies with big security budgets pay ethical hackers to attack their systems, revealing weak points and how to fix them.

 

Another study, also sponsored by Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance, found that 81% of small business respondents reported a complete lack of a coherent cyber security policy for the business, despite the fact that 85% of them also said that their business was safe from cyber attacks. This is a striking mismatch, made even more so by the fact that it indicates a complete disregard for the realities of the ever-changing nature of cyber security. Without a policy and a plan for the worst-case scenario, businesses leave themselves wide open to network disruption, infected machines, and data loss, all of which can have a huge negative impact on a business’s ability to function.

 

So, how would you have responded? Do you believe your business is completely immune to cyber attacks? Do you have a cyber security policy in place?