Firms employing ten or fewer people are largely clueless when it comes to security, a new report has revealed.
A Fasthosts survey shows the vast majority of those firms that employ less than 10 people don’t think they could be a target of an attack. But why would they when only 14 percent have the means of detecting if they have been victims.
The survey not only found that many firms said they had never been affected by a security breach but 84 percent felt that they had some form of protection in place. That description covers a patchy deployment of some firewalls, system updates and limited intrusion detection.
Unlike those running larger businesses, only 20 percent of those quizzed by YouGov, on behalf of Fasthosts, described cybersecurity as a high priority.
Simon Yeoman, general manager at Fasthosts said: “This study shows that many micro-businesses remain in the dark over cybersecurity threats and the solutions available to defend themselves. While 84 percent of businesses claim to have ‘some form of cybersecurity protection in place,’ the fact that 33 percent of businesses do not have a firewall should be a cause for concern.”
“The research has also highlighted some misperceptions among businesses as to the best ways to protect their data. With only 15 percent of micro-businesses that store data claiming to be worried about where or how their data is stored, there seems to be widespread confusion over whether data even needs to be protected at all! This should serve as a wakeup call to all of us in the data hosting industry to help educate micro-businesses on the necessity of concrete data security practices, especially in a post-GDPR landscape where poor data practices will be very costly indeed”, he added.
