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It’s easy to think of cybercrime as an issue exclusive to bigger businesses where the databases are large and worth the effort to hack. In reality, no company is too small to catch the eye of an online attacker.
As the most recent edition of Verizon’s Mobile Security Index points out, much of today’s cybercrime is no more targeted than email spam, and small businesses are equally at risk of attack — but far less able to cope once it happens. Fortunately, while addressing a breach is expensive and complicated, you can significantly reduce your risk of suffering an attack by making just a few small changes to your mobile security practices and a relatively modest investment.
A data security breach into a large business is more likely to capture headlines, but many more small businesses face hacks, attacks and ransoms. The Verizon report shows that almost a third of small businesses (29 percent) experienced at least one mobile security breach in 2018 — nearly double the 15 percent from the year before.
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As mobile devices have grown beyond a means of checking email and into a critical component of business processes, they have become broader and richer targets for exploitation.
Businesses of all sizes and industries recognize that the mobile threats are real, with 88 percent of believing that the risks associated with mobile devices are serious and growing.
Businesses with fewer than 500 employees are the least likely to have formal processes in place to deal with ransomware or other data loss issues, and are often the last to know there is a problem. As many as 58 percent of small businesses didn’t realize they had suffered the breach until they were informed by a third party or law enforcement.
Even worse, small businesses face severe consequences. Among the businesses surveyed in the report, 66 percent suffered downtime immediately after an event, 32 percent said the necessary actions to recover from a cyberattack were “difficult and expensive,” 55 percent saw other devices compromised in the process, and 55 percent lost data. In some cases, the toll of all this distraction and cost can be enough to put an SMB out of business.
Employee education around cybercrime is part of the answer, but it is very difficult to keep everyone aware and vigilant to an ever-changing threat with increasing sophistication.
In the Verizon report, businesses of all sizes admit they can and should do more to protect themselves. Less than half of those report having any of the four basic protections in place: data encryption, security testing, access restrictions and the user requirement to change from default passwords.
Luckily, there are simple tools and practices that are easily available to businesses of all sizes that significantly reduce your security risks in relation to mobile. As part of the report, Verizon includes a framework for self-assessing your mobile security, much of which does not entail additional spending — but does require some attention and change to policy and process. Larger organizations have people or even departments assigned to manage these risks, educate employees and develop policy and process. These luxuries may be inaccessible to smaller businesses, but they aren’t required to move on down on the road toward improved mobile security.
Just as you lock your doors during the day and periodically check the batteries in your smoke alarms, a few small investments go a long way in securing your mobile environment and preparing for the increasingly likely event of a breach.
With smart devices and computers sending alerts our way left and right, we’re often inclined to swipe them to the side without paying them any mind. It’s worse for people in positions where alerts are part of their job, such as nurses and security professionals, who both suffer from a very real problem referred to as Alert Fatigue. This is a version of the adage, “When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”
If you are responsible for a small business, it is important that you don’t let yourself literally swipe this problem away. A few small steps in upgrading your approach to mobile security can pay extraordinary dividends in allowing you to reap the benefits of mobile productivity — without suffering the increasing likelihood that inactivity will put you out of business forever.
Take a free assessment to discover if you have the right mobile security plan for your business.