Recent research by Symantec found that cybercrime costs the UK economy a staggering £27 billion a year. Cyber-crime is a huge threat in today’s online world and covers a range of dangers such as IP theft, customer data loss, industrial espionage, online theft and extortion.
We’ve discussed the impact of customer data loss and some ways to help prevent it before. Naturally security measures will be specific to organisations and some businesses may have heavily invested in bespoke solutions.
A Detica and Cabinet Office report estimated that small businesses with less than 50 employees would stand to lose £3.9 million from customer data loss, and that was the best case scenario.
Cybercriminals target SMEs
The general perception is that cyber-attacks are only targeted at large, established organisations and while these organisations have been victims of attacks, the focus is turning to SMEs. Since 2010, 40% of targeted attacks have been aimed at SMEs with less than 500 employees.
Small to medium organisations may often think that cybercriminals wouldn’t waste their time trying to access the company’s data but more than 80% of SMEs are subject to a security incident in a year. There’s already a number of ways cyber-attacks are delivered and cybercriminals will always develop new and more complex methods.
Providing adequate protection across multiple entry points is a never ending task, it can exhaust your IT department and become a black hole for resources. For this reason organisations are increasingly implementing cloud security to provide protection outside their network.
The Cabinet Office ‘The Cost of Cyber Crime’ report shows that some industry sectors may be targeted more often than others for specific types of cyber-crime and each sector has a different risk profile. Whilst the statistics support this, the reality is that any organisation in any industry and of any size can be targeted at any time.
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