SMEs Cybersecurity: Being small is No Excuse

We often heard malicious hackers siphon huge funds from big firms via ransomware or other malicious attacks.

But are small businesses or small and medium enterprises (SMEs) safe from the clutches of malicious hackers?

To find out, the MyHackerNews team had interviewed Troy Kitch, Senior Director of Enterprise Solutions at Malwarebytes for his views on the matter.

Small is Beautiful 

To safeguard their business operation, Troy Kitch suggested that SMEs to invest into cybersecurity.

“The average business traditionally spends around 3-6% of total IT (information technology) spending on security,” stated Kitch.

For SMEs, Kitch believed that SMEs can use this as a guideline and budgeted appropriate funds toward security spending with the goal of reducing their cybersecurity risks.

Finally, he urged SMEs to look at look at multiple layers of security defenses that can prevent and detect different types of security threats.

Over half of SMEs are victims of cyberattacks.

The rationale of this cybersecurity investment is rather based on a shocking truth across the small business community in Asia Pacific.

According to survey done by Chubb over 1,000 SMEs across Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, around 60% of the SMEs admitted encountering at least one cyber incident in the last 12 months.

A further breakdown of the report revealed that nearly 71% of SMEs polled in Hong Kong were targeted by malicious hacker, then followed by Australia at 60% and finally Singapore at 56%.

Protection for Cloud Network and Cashless payment                                      

With the prevalent of cloud technology and cashless payments, SMEs cannot neglect in that area and need to adopt best practices to protect their assets.

“As best practice, small businesses should protect what is important based on risk levels,” said Kitch.

To him, these include the understanding of your technology environment and even staff education on cloud providers’ responsibilities as compared to business responsibilities.

For instance, SMEs can find out if their cloud service providers are complying to industry standards and best practices such as encryption of data and up-to-date software patches.

In term of cashless payment, the protection of the endpoints is something SMEs should consider as that where the sensitive financial data often resides.