Employees know all the ins and outs of a company’s infrastructure and cybersecurity tools. And cyber attacks on small businesses represent the largest share of all the attacks in the report. And the best way to protect one’s small business is to employ an ecosystem of security solutions that work together to catch fraudulent spend quicker and put an end to data breaches much faster. In this article, we discuss the reasons for and consequences of five benchmark data … Unlawful access to information. During a phishing, malware or ransomware attack, small businesses lose credit card numbers and other critical customer data – and they also lose customer confidence. According to Layr, 60% of small business will go out of business six months after a data breach or cyber-attack occurs. In the two prior fiscal years, participants report 58% in FY 2018 and 54% in FY 2017, respectively. Many GDPR breaches are revealed after internal investigations within an organisation, when the organisation has the option to report the staff member who made the offense, which is what happened to the social services support officer in Dorset County Council after it was revealed they accessed social care records without having any business reason to do so. Data Breaches Bring Dire Consequences to SMB’s. Small businesses often lack the time, resources, and know-how to implement measures to protect themselves. From disgruntled employees committing sabotage to innocent mistakes, humans are one of your organization's greatest information security risks. Once this happened rarely. In fact, recent cybersecurity statistics show that, despite their size, small businesses account for the majority of data breaches (58%). Example Data Breach Costs The following industry-specific examples are based on claims data collected by the data breach insurance carrier RGS Limited and a 2016 small and medium-sized company data breach report published by the state of California. Data from a 2019 study by Keeper Security and the Ponemon Institute shows that the number of small and medium-sized businesses that experienced data breaches increased to 63% in FY 2019. When did you last read about a small business being hacked in the news? That’s why we witness hundreds of malicious and inadvertent insider attacks that lead to data breaches and harm companies. In fact, a shocking amount of high-profile data breaches in recent years have occurred because of employee behaviors. Such attacks often lead to financial and reputational losses and may even ruin a business. In the past year, 77% of data breaches involved an insider, according to Verizon. But according to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 43% of cyber-attacks target small businesses. Risk to Small Business: 2.142 = Severe: Due to the personalized nature of this data breach, anyone conducting a personal or business real estate transaction is encouraged to be highly critical of digital funding requests. The consequences to small businesses can be devastating in terms of profit, growth, and customer loyalty. Businesses don't need to be massive corporations or house treasure troves of sensitive information to be frequent targets of cyber attacks. Small businesses at high risk for data breach The big data breaches make headlines — such as the millions of consumers whose financial secrets were exposed by the Target Corp. hack. 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