Terri Ramsey Beavers There has never been a more crucial time for businesses of all sizes to develop robust cyber resilience. Cybercrime is on the rise, and no industry is immune. If you’ve been on the fence about whether it’s worth dedicating resources to a backup and disaster recovery plan, consider the following five stats, fresh from 2022:
1. Only 7% of companies are safe from hackers
After conducting penetration testing across a variety of industries, including government, finance, energy, and even IT companies, Positive Technologies found that 93% were easily breached. The average time taken to access a company’s internal network was two days, and the most common route (71% of all cases) was compromised credentials. In other words, all it took was cracking someone’s ridiculously easy password.
2. Cybercrime is set to become a $10.5 trillion industry
According to Cybercrime Magazine, we can look forward to an annual cybercrime growth rate of around 15% per year. By 2025, this will mean the criminals are collectively raking in more than $10 trillion a year from businesses.
While the largest ransoms do come from massive multinational companies, this doesn’t mean small businesses are immune. Earning a cool $40 mil from a major insurance company surely would have resulted in plenty of high fives among the criminals responsible. However, these big attacks also require more resources and attract more attention.
Criminals are just as happy to earn a few thousand here and there from smaller operations. Indeed, Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report found that small businesses accounted for around 43% of all cyberattacks that year.
3. Small businesses need to train their staff
Forbes found that the most common attack vectors for small businesses in 2022 are compromised credentials, stolen devices, phishing, and social engineering attacks. To avoid all of these vulnerabilities, it’s essential that business owners and their teams undergo cybersecurity training. This is your best chance of recognizing phishing attempts before anyone clicks a link or unintentionally downloads malware. It will also give you the knowledge and resources you need to protect your devices and manage your passwords effectively.
4. There are more cyberattacks than we’ll ever know about
In a recent survey conducted by Statista, around 45% of respondents reported that their company had been the target of one to five successful cyberattacks in the last year alone. It’s crucial to note that cyberattacks are underreported for various reasons, including fear of reputational damage and loss of customer trust. Though this is understandable, it means that even the scariest statistics you see on cybercrime are only telling a fraction of the full story.
5. Ransomware is on the rise
When a cybercrime syndicate is able to successfully secure a $40 million payout, this tells other criminals that they’re looking at an astonishingly lucrative industry. In the wake of several highly successful ransomware attacks in recent years, cybercrime syndicates have become more unified and organized.
According to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ransomware attacks increased by around 150% in 2021. The cybersecurity agency predicted even steeper growth in 2022. Building on this data, Cloudwards found that ransoms are paid in around 32% of cases, with an average cost of $1.8 million. Despite this, companies often get less than 65% of their data back.
While the situation may look dire, there is less to fear if you have robust cybersecurity, cloud-based data backup, and a foolproof disaster recovery plan in place.