At this moment, thousands of small businesses in the U.S. are losing around $8,500 per hour of downtime due to ransomware, according to Aberdeen Group, or more than $75 billion per year. These cyber attacks literally hold data for ransom, and since organizations are only as strong as their data, ransomware can easily wipe out even the most stable of businesses in the blink of an eye. If that situation doesn’t earn a spot on your worst-case scenario list, consider that the cyber criminals perpetrating such attacks rarely suffer consequences, honing their craft while they bring businesses to the ground.
Today, the majority of ransomware attacks are conducted by large, sophisticated criminal organizations with massive reach. There are a wide variety of ransomware strains out there, each with unique properties and behaviors. However, many business owners underestimate the scale of the ransomware threat and are woefully unprepared to deal with an attack. To avoid an oversight that could kill your growing business, entrepreneurs need to get educated about today’s security threats and heed advice from the IT community and authorities.
When ransomware hits, small businesses suffer.
In a recent survey by Datto, more than 91 percent of IT service providers reported that their small business clients were victimized by ransomware in the past year; and 40 percent experienced six or more attacks in that same timeframe. With fewer resources on hand, smaller organizations are less prepared to withstand the downtime that typically follows a security incident than larger, more established businesses.
Although ransomware is a widely recognized threat, a lack of incident reports prevents federal agencies from fully investigating the issue. Last year,…