A Short Small-Business Introduction to Cybersecurity [Infographics]

Did you know that cybercrime is currently the fastest growing crime, more profitable even than the global major drug trafficking? With the constant rise of security breaches and total cost, it is estimated that damages inflicted by cybercriminals will cost the whole world up to$6 trillion each year until 2021.

Business Introduction to Cybersecurity

This all becomes much more serious if you are a small business owner. Why is that? Because small businesses are the most profitable targets for hackers, representing 43% of all cyber victims. The main reason is that they don’t invest as much in their cybersecurity as other bigger companies and corporations, becoming vulnerable and easy to penetrate.

Only28% of small business companies believe they can highly effectively defend themselves against threats and attacks. With an average cost of an incident of almost $200,000, it is no wonder that around 60% of businesses go down within half a year.

Believe it or not but the main culprit of successful attacks are people. Yes, more than half of successful attacks are caused by social engineering, notably phishing. If you haven´ttrained your staff on best practices concerning passwords, handling emails, and hardware, or if you are not keeping them up to date with the latest cybercrime phenomenon, you are in danger of losing your business.

Around81% of business data breaches happen because employees are using weak passwords, while over 70% of them use the same one for multiple accounts. Not to mention that most of them fail to update them regularly.

Mishandling of business hardware is another issue, with36% of employees admitting of using non-work devices at work (like USBs) while one-third used a personal email for work purposes at some point.

With negligent employees still representing your weakest link, continuous staff training will definitely turn out to be the most valuable investment for your business.