South Africa is being targeted by cyber criminals more and more. Our country's third-highest number of cyber crime victims globally costs R2.2 billion a year.
Cyber attacks on small to medium-sized businesses are becoming more frequent, targeted and complex. According to Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study, 43% of cyber attacks are aimed at small businesses. And phishing is the number one type of fraud globally.
Large organisations have whole departments dedicated to cyber security. Small to medium-sized businesses often react to cyber attacks once it's too late. The impact of a cyber security attack can be devastating and last weeks or months from which you may never recover. Here are ways cyber crime can hurt your business.
Finances
The worst consequence of a cyber attack is the damage to your bottom line. Your regular business operations are compromised. Customers could switch to a competitor to protect themselves from cyber crime. You can also lose money to hackers who hold your information and business for ransom.
Productivity
A cyber attack can prevent your employees from accessing your system, disrupting productivity and profitability. Cyber criminals can use any number of ways to handcuff a company’s everyday activities, whether by infecting computer systems with malware that erases information or installs malicious code on a server.
Reputation
If your business falls victim to a cyber attack, it could tarnish your reputation. Customers and even suppliers may feel less secure giving their sensitive information to a company whose IT infrastructure was compromised.
Legal liability
If you’re a victim of an attack, you may have to pay even more for attorney fees and damages due to legal action against your company.
Sustainability
Cyber crime is costly and can damage your business’s relationship with your customers and suppliers. As cyber crime becomes more sophisticated, you must stay updated and protected to survive and prosper.
First line of defence is your people
Remote working has placed employees outside your business’s usual security infrastructure, leaving them and your business vulnerable to various cyber attacks.
We’ve already seen high-volume social media security breaches. Add this information to what employees share on social media and online. There is a scary amount of personal data and intelligence available. Cyber criminals will exploit this and create ever more convincing attacks.
Human error is behind around 95% of cyber security breaches. Your staff need to be well informed and well equipped to protect themselves against cyber crime.
We believe in taking a proactive approach towards cyber security. Defending your organisation against cyber attacks requires continuous security education and awareness.
Most concerning cyber crime on the rise in 2022
Fifty-seven percent of the most common attacks on small businesses are phishing and social engineering.
Phishing is a type of social engineering. Cyber criminals use fake e-mails to trick employees into clicking links to malicious websites or open attachments containing malware to access your organisation’s systems or sensitive information. Ninety-six percent of phishing attacks arrive via e-mail.
We recommend a combined solution including identity threat protection, anti-phishing heuristics protection and user awareness training to identify and mitigate phishing attacks effectively. We encourage you to train your staff by staging random phishing simulations. Here, you can learn how to run your phishing test on our blog.
There are other cyber security threats predicted to increase in 2022.
Supply chain cyber attacks
Cyber criminals can take advantage of a lack of monitoring across your supply chain. They perform different types of cyber attacks, from data breaches to malware infections that can even spread to your customers.
Mobile malware attacks
A total of 66.6% of the world's population use a smartphone. More people have access to smartphones than clean water. They use their mobile devices for personal and business communications and banking and shopping, to name a few things. As mobile wallets and mobile payment platform use become more and more widespread, cyber criminals will increasingly exploit the growing reliance on mobile devices.
Ransomware as a service
Ransomware as a service, or RaaS, is an already-developed ransomware tool available on subscription to criminals to use and execute ransomware attacks. According to industry experts, South African victims of ransomware pay on average more than R3.2 million in ransom, and as few as a third of the victims get their data back after they pay. RaaS will continue to spread and evolve and affects organisations of every size and shape.
Get protected, stay protected
As an expert in e-mail security, SYNAQ is more than capable of helping mitigate some of these threats and more. If you’re concerned that you, your employees or your business are not adequately prepared and protected, get in touch.
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