What is a cyber crisis & how can a small business stay prepared?
Ransomware attacks on small businesses are on the rise. Almost half (43%) of all cyber attacks now target organizations with 250 or fewer employees. According to reports, there is a one-in-two chance that your small business will be the victim of a cyberattack in the next 12 months. In fact, one out of every five small businesses has already been infected with ransomware.
What is a cyber crisis?
A cybercrime occurs when a cybercriminal installs ransomware on your website or files and holds your information and data hostage until you pay a ransom. When ransomware strikes, the average small business suffers two days of downtime. They pay anywhere between a few thousand and tens of thousands of dollars to recover their data. One-third of them lose actual revenue, and all suffer brand and loyalty damage that is much more difficult to quantify and recover from.
Unfortunately, while the majority of small businesses pay the ransom, this does not guarantee anything. Many businesses have fully complied with ransom demands, only to have the hacker increase the ransom demand—or simply take the ransom and your data—and then disappear. It's no surprise, then, that ransomware, phishing attacks, and other viruses are ranked as the top threat to small business data by 41% of those polled.
Why does my small business need a cybersecurity and disaster recovery plan?
One click can unlock the doors to your business data
Small businesses are increasingly being targeted by cyberattacks. Smaller organizations have fewer resources to devote to data security, making them an easier target for cybercriminals. Only compromising one user frequently grants the hacker "keys to the castle."
With a seemingly innocuous click on a link or email attachment, ransomware silently installs on a victim's device and launches an extortion attack, demanding a ransom in exchange for data access. If that user is connected to a cloud collaboration tool, such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox, the virus can quickly spread throughout the organization. Now the entire company is in risk.
