SMB’s Attacked 15x More Often

Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMB’s) are attacked fifteen times more often than smaller firms (>10 employees) and larger firms (<100 employees).  In 2018 they accounted for 43% of all security incidents. This puts the engine of the world’s economy squarely in harms way. SMB’s are attacked more often because of:

• weaker technical protections;
• they have items of value (money) to steal;
• untrained employees,
• less supervision and controls around insiders, and
• sometimes for the access they have to other businesses.

Training employees on how to spot attacks is the best “returns-on-investment” SMB’s can make to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack.  SMB employees have typically never received any Cybersecurity education in school or from previous employers.  Arm your employees with the knowledge and skills to fight back! Our school system graduates high-school, post-secondary, and even doctoral program students with little to no cybersecurity training. This is why we have  witnessed a dramatic rise in cyber-attacks over the last few years. For example, 60-minutes ran a 12 minute story last week on 22 towns and government agencies breached by ransomware. Hacker attacks come from many different groups of people today.  Organized crime hacks to steal our money while nation states hack to steal our Intellectual property.  Hacktivists target special-interest groups to make a point while disgruntled employees may be out for money, revenge or both. All these groups are hanging around our business front doors using the Internet both as their super-highway to you and their invisibility shield to hide their attack tracks with impunity. What makes them so dangerous and successful is the availability of advanced, sophisticated hacking software purchased easily on the dark web. These hacking tools can encrypt your files and hold you out for ransom without writing a single line of code.

Protection Starts with Education

Start pulling your cybersecurity program together by educating employees on cybersecurity topics such as cyber-policies, training videos, and technical cybersecurity tools such as password managers. The more you know, the better you can fight back. If you’ve been on the fence about addressing this risk in your business, now is the time to make a decision and give CyberHoot a free trial run for 30 days.  Start a CyberHoot free trial to jump-start your cyber-program protection today. In under an hour your employees can begin training, delivered by a fully-automated tool so simple there is no manual. Give us a try, you’ll be glad you did.