Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2019

94
The Growing Costs of Cyber Attacks on UK Small Businesses
By Dan Baker, Content Writer, SecureTeam
The amount of cyber attacks in the UK and across the world continues to grow each year and small
businesses are increasingly the targets of these attacks. In fact, UK small businesses are being
targeted by an estimated 65,000 cyber attacks every day. Fortunately, the majority of these attacks fail.
However, due to the volume of attacks, several cybercriminals achieve their aims and a small business
in the UK is successfully hacked every 19 seconds.
The Growing Threat of Cybercrime
Many small business owners don’t realise or believe that they are at risk of cybercrime and mistakenly
believe that hackers only target big companies. Unfortunately, the tools available to cybercriminals
have expanded and now even unsophisticated hackers have access to complex tools that have been
created by more advanced cybercriminals, allowing them to target smaller businesses with these
powerful hacking tools.
With 43% of cyber attacks in the UK targeting small businesses, it has never been more vital for small
business owners to prepare for the inevitable breach. Nearly 2/3rds of UK businesses that employ