A UK based organization, Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) which represents small and medium-sized businesses has found that the country's small companies are collectively subject to almost 10,000 cyberattacks per day.
The recent findings revealed that one in five small companies accepted that it had been the victim of a data breach in the two years to January, while an average of over 9,000 cyber-attack incidents reported daily during the same period.
After discovering this alarming situation and understanding the fact that such attacks cost around £4.5 billion each year, FSB asked the UK government, as well as banks and software companies to take meaningful actions to secure the small business community from cybercrime.
The most common and frequently reported cyber threat is phishing attacks, which approximately affected 530,000 small UK based firms over the past two years, while malware, fraudulent payment requests and ransomware attacks targeted 374,000 firms, 301,000 and 260,000 companies respectively.
As reported by The Scotsman, Martin McTague, chairman of FSB policy and advocacy, the recent development in finding details on such attacks "demonstrate the sheer scale of the dangers faced by small firms every day in the digital arena."
He further said that the government should take a step further to tackle this "scourge by enhancing the current policing response – including investing more in cyber upskilling for police personnel as part of its wider recruitment push."
McTague also believes that in terms of safeguarding the organizations, banks also have a key role to play. As per him they should be "building in as much resilience as possible into banking and payments systems, and made liable for the losses of business – not just consumer – customers when they fall victim to cybercrime. Software providers could also be doing more."
Here it should be mentioned that as per a new report from The Cybersecurity Imperative, many companies around the world are expected to boost cybersecurity investments by 34% in the next fiscal year owing to an alarming situation created by recent cyber-attacks, showing that at least one in 10 organizations invariably lose more than $10 million due to hacking or data breach.
It also mentioned that all the global private or government organizations should take a proactive, multi-layered defence to combat such criminal activities and the companies are responding by allocating the biggest share of their budgets to technology while seeking the right balance between investments in people and process.
On the other hand, a global survey by cybersecurity company, CyberArk revealed that 45 percent of local organisations believe attackers can infiltrate their networks each time they try. As organisations increase investments in automation and agility, a general lack of awareness about the existence of privileged credentials – across DevOps, robotic process automation (RPA) and in the cloud– is compounding the risk.
