SMBs are most at risk from data breaches, warns Juniper

The average SMB spends a little over £3,000 on cybersecurity annually – but a data breach can cost as much as £300,000.

SME’s are particularly at risk as continual criminal data breaches grow over the next 5 years with an expected cost to businesses totaling $8 trillion, most SME’s are unable to protect themselves adequately.

Figures from Juniper research predict numbers of personal data records stolen by cybercriminals to reach to around 2.8billion this year.   This is despite the spreading of new Infosec (Information Security) solutions. Juniper are reporting that cybersecurity starts to become especially tricky when new and old systems are grouped together without concern for the overall network security.

SMEs must protect themselves

It is being reported that the average SME will most likely spend less than $4000 on cybersecurity this year, they also tend to use older security software which are vulnerable to attacks like WannaCry (The Ransomware virus that recently threatened the NHS) which exploited this.

“The attacks on hospital infrastructure show that inadequate cybersecurity can now cost lives as well as money” – James Moar, Juniper Research

Even though WannaCry was a pretty basic tool, it really showed how popular ransomware is ever increasing in the hacking community. All businesses need to be vigilant for more advanced forms, as ransoming stored data and devices is looking like it will be become more lucrative than stealing financial details. Juniper are expecting easy-to-use ransomware toolkits to be developed in the future.

According to Juniper Research’s new whitepaper, the use of ransomware sped up in 2015 and 2016. Juniper are expecting these attacks to continue to rise with the ever increase of IoT devices we have in the world today.

Additionally to ransomware, denial of service (DoS) attacks are common too, whilst they regularly serve to hide another move that the attacker is making. DDoS attacks, says Juniper, are now frequently targeting root DNS services of a network, rather than the application layer. The outcome is to heighten the effect of an attack by taking down the support structure, not just the services alone.

Experian released its own whitepaper last year on the topic of data breaches, in which it said that SMEs vastly underestimate the cost of a breach – by an average of 40 per cent. Government figures (from the Information Security Breaches Survey 2015) show that breaches cost £310,000 on average, while most SMEs estimate the cost to be around £180,000.

Soon after the WannaCry worm spread across the world, several tips on how to protect yourself and your business was published, all companies should follow this as a matter of course too as an aid against ransomware.