Small businesses are not only essential in keeping Main Street thriving and bustling, but they are essential to our economy.
Unauthorized access to data has the potential for significant financial loss that can be difficult or impossible to recover.
Cybercrime has become a thriving business, with 95 percent of data breaches coming from the work of financially driven threat actors using increasingly sophisticated tactics and advanced techniques to threaten companies both large and small.
An expanded attack surface, including the proliferation of end points and the adoption of digital technologies without adequate security controls in place, is fueling the increase in cybercrime, according to the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.
Cybercriminals see small to medium-sized businesses as easy targets with valuable data ripe for the taking.
The Verizon report revealed that these businesses, with under one-thousand employees, are just as vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, if not more so, than large businesses.
The reason is that smaller companies may lack the resources and expertise to implement strong security controls to adequately prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks.
74 percent of breaches involved human actions, whereby adversaries use social engineering and misrepresentation tactics to steal data or hold businesses ransom.
These attacks compromise the availability of networks and systems by overwhelming them with large amounts of data.
If a business leverages technology, they have a cybersecurity problem.
Establish and maintain a security awareness program for your workforce to be security conscious and reduce cybersecurity risks.
Companies will want to look into basic security controls including antivirus software, firewalls, and multifactor authentication.
Building in a layer of cybersecurity defenses with security controls and protective measures - even one layer at a time - will go a long way to strengthening SMBs and their current cybersecurity posture.
That's a good formula for growing a company's cybersecurity efforts, along with its business, over time.
As Vice President of Verizon Business Markets, I lead three critical business units for small and midsize business customers: network as a service, Fios for Business and our channel program.
My team of 1,200+ professionals partner with customers on their digital transformation journeys, providing innovative managed solutions for total communications, connectivity, collaboration and security.
Our customer-centric organization delivers 5G technologies, fiber, ethernet, security solutions, and unified communications solutions such as One Talk and Microsoft Teams.
As businesses across all segments and industries anticipate a post-pandemic comeback, they are looking to adopt 5G and its potential to create new opportunities and build new efficiencies and scale their businesses.
Our team also provides Fios for Business, business digital voice, and easy to deploy and use set of security and collaboration products.
As a result, Verizon was the first carrier in the world to launch Apple Business Manager, an iconic solution.
This Cyber News was published on www.cyberdefensemagazine.com. Publication date: Sun, 02 Jun 2024 20:13:06 +0000