Bharat Bhise HNA is a cybersecurity expert who I had the great pleasure of speaking with recently about the importance of cybersecurity in business. The possibility of an attack on a business can cause an untold amount of damage which is something that not enough businesses, large and small, are aware of. Whilst many businesses are looking to beef up their cybersecurity, many small businesses see this as an expense which they just don’t need and as result are not protecting themselves.
As we have seen in recent years however, many hackers understand that small businesses are not properly protecting themselves and this gives them carte blanche to attack these companies. Let’s take a look then at just what the damage would be to a small business if an attack were to happen.
Lost Days
Once a cyber attack takes place a small business can expect to be offline for a number of days as their systems are repaired and software updated. This of course can be expensive if the business relies heavily on those computer systems in the day-to-day running of the company. Workers will be paid without jobs to do and the business will be on a slow down which is going to run up quite a bill.
Reputation Damage
Hacks happen for a number of reasons, sometimes it is a threat or warning, but this rarely happens with smaller companies. The second reason why cybercriminals look to perform these attacks is because they know that no matter how small the business, it is likely that they are going to have personal information about customers and staff on those systems. This information in the wrong hands can easily lead to identity fraud. Once work gets out about this attack the business will take a huge hit to their reputation and their credibility and trying to get the customer’s trust again will be all but impossible. This reputation damage will cost the business a huge amount of money both now and in the future.
Security
Businesses who don’t have security and then get hacked are most certainly going to be looking into beefing up their security post-attack, which is now going to be an additional reactionary cost, rather than the proactive cost which they would have incurred if they did it in the first place.
The cost of an attack like this on a small business can run into the tens of thousands once you take all factors into consideration. Given that the reason why so many small businesses don’t invest in cybersecurity is that they don’t wish to spend the money, it is likely that the cost of an attack is going to do untold damage to the finances of that business. As you can see from the potential consequences it makes far more business and financial sense to get protected before it is too late.
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