
A dangerous assumption: Mid-sized businesses often assume their larger competitors are more likely to be targeted by cyber criminals.
Cybercrime is a scary area for any business, with recent figures highlighting losses of £1.18m replacing damaged hardware and £2.19m in lost revenue as a result of security breaches, according to the Opinion Matters Working Online survey.
However, even in light of numerous high-profile corporate hacking cases in recent years, only about six in ten (58 per cent) of SMBs report being concerned about loss of company or customer information, social engineering or employee identity theft.
Stolen data is hugely damaging to business, both in a financial and a reputational aspect. The Opinion Matters research highlighted a particularly sensitive time window for cybercrime in the mid-market, between January and April when payments and transactions to tax and revenue agencies are at their highest. During this time, fraudulent emails and malware designed to compromise IT security are especially prevalent, and extra caution is vital in order to keep financial and personal data out of the hands of cyber criminals. The most common fraudulent messages directed towards SMBs are designed to appear as if they have come from banks or financial institutions like the HMRC. Alarmingly, only 30.5 per cent of SMBs surveyed would think twice about clicking on a link directing them to the HMRC site. Surprisingly, the legal sector is particularly careless here: only 11 per cent are cautious about clicking on links posing as the HMRC. In fact, some 56.9 per cent of SMBs surveyed had received fraudulent emails asking for money, 36.8 per cent had received fake tax rebate emails, and some 12.3 per cent had been directed to a fake government web page before.- A secure message is waiting for you, click here to read;
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