Hackers Only Target Big Companies, Right?
It’s only the multi-nationals like British Airways and Marriot Hotels or big sites like Facebook and Google, right? Well yes, those companies have all been hit by big breaches over the past few years, but they most certainly aren’t the only businesses targeted by hackers.
Many smaller companies will see these large companies hit by cyber attacks and think they won’t be targeted as they never see anything about small companies being hit by hackers. But of course that in itself is the reason why more and more hackers are targeting small businesses.
On average, a small business will endure an average of 65,000 attempted attacks every day, according to research by Hiscox. Furthermore, one in three small businesses are hacked successfully every year. That equates to more than 1,500,000 SMEs getting successfully hacked per year, or 4,500 every single day.
According to government research as part of their Cyber Streetwise campaign, they found that out of the surveyed SMEs that had been hit by cyber attacks:
With around three quarters of SMEs not budgeting for disaster recovery and over half of them having no cyber security strategies in place, hackers are becoming more and more successful every single year and business owners are struggling to keep up.
Businesses may have technology in place to attempt to stop fraud, be it professional anti-virus software, email filtering and more, but there is no way to be 100% safe from these attacks. All it takes is one employee slipping up and a hacker can gain access. What you can do, however, is ensure that your business can continue trading without much delay.
As part of your disaster recovery / business continuity plan, you should be backing up your data. This completely eliminates the threat of ransomware and enables you to be back up and running fast, reducing downtime to a minimum. It’s like having fire alarms and fire extinguishers. You need to have precautions in place to limit the damage to your company in the case of an emergency.
For more information on data backup please check out our backup options, Datahive and Veeam.