The Reality of our Cybersecurity Threat Landscape

Cybercriminals are constantly changing the way they deliver attacks on networks to take advantage of employee’s trust, and compromise or steal data.  Smaller businesses may think they aren’t a target, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, small businesses with 100 employees or less face the same risk of attack as 20,000-employee enterprises.  No matter the size, businesses need to enhance their IT security posture to protect themselves as threats spread and become more elegant, complicated and malicious.

Some challenges that businesses face today are:

• They don’t know/understand their current security risks and can easily maintain false sense of security believing they are “too small” or their “data isn’t that important”

• They can’t see the suspicious activity that is already happening on their network

• They have limited ability to react and respond to threats

• They are unprepared and don’t have the necessary tools or process to address breaches or actual attacks

• Their employees don’t grasp and/or don’t have skills to practice caution and awareness

• Security breaches compromise the reputation and financial stability of an organization

Some statistics that align with those challenges are:

• 71% of attacks are aimed at small to mid-sized businesses

• 67% of businesses have experienced or are experiencing a breach

• 56% of breaches take months or longer to discover

• 63% of businesses go out of business after they experience a data breach

• 92% of all data breaches are caused by employee mistakes

To keep up with growing cybersecurity threats, businesses need to adopt more innovative and proactive methods of protection.  It’s increasingly important to layer security throughout the network…there isn’t a silver bullet.  Implementing enhanced firewalling practices, using multi-factor authentication, installing next-generation antivirus, leveraging security awareness training, enforcing password management tools and mobile device security, are a few specific examples of how businesses can build cybersecurity resiliency.  It’s also critical that businesses understand their specific and current business risk related to cybersecurity so that plans can be generated to strengthen security posture.  Implementing better tools, technology, training and policy is critical to help protect a business from increasing threats and provide a chance to recover should the business experience a breach.  If you need help assessing your cybersecurity risk or want help improving IT security strategy, call Connecting Point and we can help.

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