Security used to be easy. Train your team, install Anti-Virus software, keep everything up to date and let it do its thing. Sadly that’s not the case anymore.
Awareness of cybercrime amongst small business owners is on the increase, but many remain unsure on:
- The nature and sheer quantity of cyber threats that face their organisation.
- How to protect themselves and their businesses from these threats.
- The extent of the damage an attack can cause, both financially and to their reputation, and most worryingly;
- If a legitimate concern exists. Surely hackers don’t target small businesses?
The reality is that everybody is at risk. No business is too small to be subject to a cyber attack. We’ve recently seen a small business hit with ransomware, bringing operations to a halt whilst their IT team struggled to regain control for an entire week. The volume of these threats is high, as automated attacks require little skill to execute and are cheap and easy to run, therefore they will target any business, big or small.
According to the UK Government, almost half (48%) of businesses identified at least one cyberattack per month. Whilst the Federation of Small Businesses suggests that the annual cost of cyber attacks stands at £4.5 billion for small businesses in the UK.
The latest digital threats are evading AV solutions. 82% of small businesses in the UK say that a cyber attack has hit them, and their antivirus package did nothing to help. Here’s why: they rely on signatures to detect threats, yet many modern threats don’t contain signatures; therefore, they are slipping through the net and remaining undetected.
4 Threats your Antivirus solution might miss.
- Weaponised documents look like harmless PDF attachments in your emails but execute attacks once they enter your network.
- Fileless threats don’t require downloads but execute from memory, making them difficult to identify.
- Zero-day threats find an unknown computer vulnerability and exploit it before software of hardware providers can issue updates.
- Ransomware attacks can disable IT networks, sometimes forever.
Using Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).
Can your security solution:
- Monitor your systems in real-time?
- Use artificial intelligence to detect and prevent the latest threats?
- Monitor processes before, during, and after execution to keep new threats from slipping in?
- Keep your device performing fast while conducting continuous monitoring?
- Rollback devices if ransomware hits them?
EDR can do all of the above, while Antivirus can’t.
Threats may evolve, but you’ll stay safe.
If cybersecurity issues keep you up at night, you’re right to be concerned. As you add more apps, devices, and connections, cyber attackers have more opportunities to penetrate your network. Using EDR that gets smarter every day with artificial intelligence lets you detect and block the latest threats, and protect against ransomware by rolling back devices to their pre-infection state.
If you’d like some advice and support, please do get in touch.
