Over a third of small businesses have witnessed data breaches in 2019, according to a recent Kaspersky survey.

The survey said that while the data breaches threaten small companies with painful consequences, the security measures taken by them to prevent such incidents are often insufficient.

“Smaller companies are often focused on how to make their business work and grow — just like they should be. They may not have cybersecurity among their top priorities, however, the cost for overlooking the problem will only grow. Why? Because malware doesn’t distinguish between its victims and because even very small organizations have something to lose, such as sensitive data,” commented Andrey Dankevich, Solution Business Lead, Kaspersky.

“But the good news is that to be able to protect themselves both from malware and human factor risks, these smaller companies don’t need to invest much or hire advanced specialists. It is only a matter of choosing the right security product,” said Dankevich.

As their resources are often limited and concentrated on business growth, they regularly have to stop or slow down their work processes and risk losing profit with every passing hour or day of downtime. If customers’ personal data has been affected, the small business can lose customer trust and face financial penalties for breaking regulations, for example, such as GDPR, the report said.

The number of such data breaches targeted at small businesses are on the rise and the number of those affected is growing year on year, and most significantly, faster than in any other sector.

Though the share of those who fell victim to data breaches is higher among SMBs (46 per cent) and enterprises (53 per cent), in smaller companies it has climbed six percentage points (from 30 per cent in 2018 ) since last year. This means that even though all businesses have to deal with data breaches to some extent, for smaller ones the problem becomes more and more relevant and dangerous every year.

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