Best Practices for Reducing the Cost of a Cyber ​​Incident for Small and Medium Businesses | Integreon

This article originally appeared in American Business Magazine on May 2, 2024. The original article can be found here.

Many small and medium-sized business owners believe that they are not the main target of a cyber breach and that threat actors only target large companies. This is a false and costly assumption. Smaller companies experience more data breaches and incur significantly higher data breach costs each year.

Smaller businesses are often affected by data breaches for a variety of reasons. desirable goals. Cybercriminals know that weaker security measures make small businesses more vulnerable to attacks than larger companies. Additionally, most small businesses do not have a sophisticated infrastructure that lacks best practice protocols such as backups of data stored externally or offline, which may require paying a ransom to obtain a decryption key. Compared to larger, better-prepared companies that typically manage backups, smaller companies are at a disadvantage and threat actors are taking full advantage.

Smaller organizations are often not financially equipped to withstand a cyberattack, and most do not have cyber insurance. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report, companies with fewer than 5,000 employees reported that the average impact of a data breach increased by almost 20%, with the average cost ranging between $3.29 million and $4.87 million -Dollars lay. If true, a successful cyberattack could result in the closure of more than 50 percent of small businesses.