What Hacking Means for Small Businesses

Over the past few years, hacking and cybersecurity topics have dominated the headlines like never before. While is it obviously disconcerting to read about foreign collusion, high-level data breaches and wide-scale cyberattacks, you don't think of yourself as much of a target. Sadly, if you believe this, you are probably the perfect target for a cyberattack.

Many people and businesses mistakenly believe that are too insignificant to show up on a hacker's radar. But the truth of the matter is that small businesses are highly sought after by cybercriminals because they know these targets very rarely have the resources necessary to detect and thwart an attack.

According to recent studies, 71 percent of cyberattacks occur at businesses with fewer than 100 employees! Thankfully, small businesses don't need to suffer these threats alone. A cyber insurance policy from CyberPolicy can help keep SMBs safe from the financial damages wrought by nefarious actors.

Give It to Me Straight: What Does Hacking Mean for Me?
While there are countless motivations for hacking and dozens of different cyberattacks, the consequences of being a victim are pretty clear and can be divided into five categories.

Financial Harm: According to Kaspersky Labs, the average cost of a small business security breach is between $38,000 and $55,000 when you account for business downtime, lost opportunities and professional services to mitigate and investigate the security breach.

Bankruptcy: Obviously, these expenses would be difficult to overcome for any SMB, but they could be especially destructive for fledgling companies. Unfortunately, a single attack could kill a promising startup if the attack was egregious enough or if the company weak enough to succumb to financial pressures.

Reputational Damages: There's no doubt about it, security breaches are a PR nightmare. Now you might think damages to reputation are worse for large companies, but you should realize these businesses usually have a long history to fall back on. Will partners and investors still want to work with you if they think their data might be at risk in your hands?

Loss of Customer Confidence: Of course, nothing is worse than letting down your customers. Even if the data breach wasn't your fault, it's heartbreaking to tell your customers that their personal or financial information may be compromised. How likely are they to do business with you again?

Internal Chaos: Getting hacked is stressful. There's scrambling and confusion as your IT teams work to fully understand the incident (which can sometimes take months to discover). Then there's the aftermath as you try to repair your systems, recover your data and reinforce your security infrastructure. That's a lot of time wasted when you could be building your company.

Luckily, there is something you can do about all this. Investing in a cyber insurance plan form CyberPolicy will insulate your company from the financial wreckage brought on by data breach and cyberattack. We can also help you report incidents, assess damages and communicate the incident to your customers.

Do the right thing and visit CyberPolicy today!

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