The Cyber Defense eMagazine March Edition for 2024

How Main Street Businesses Can Up Their
Cybersecurity Game
By Mike Caralis, Vice President, Business Markets at Verizon
Small businesses are not only essential in keeping Main Street thriving and bustling (I love my local sushi
place), but they are essential to our economy. In fact, they account for 44 percent of U.S. economic
activity according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. They are also at a high risk for cyberattacks
and data breaches, putting their business — including their sensitive information, customer data, and
intellectual property — at great risk. Unauthorized access to data has the potential for significant financial
loss that can be difficult or impossible to recover.
Meanwhile, cybercrime has become a thriving business, with 95 percent of data breaches coming from
the work of financially driven threat actors using increasingly sophisticated tactics and advanced
techniques to threaten companies both large and small. An expanded attack surface, including the
proliferation of end points and the adoption of digital technologies without adequate security controls in
place, is fueling the increase in cybercrime, according to the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations
Report (DBIR).
Cybercriminals see small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as easy targets with valuable data ripe
for the taking. The Verizon report revealed that these businesses, with under one-thousand employees,
are just as vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, if not more so, than large businesses. The reason is that
smaller companies may lack the resources and expertise to implement strong security controls to
adequately prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks.
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