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by Scott Lerner, Director of Mid Market Sales at Verizon Business Markets
Twitter | @Coach_Lerner
You might think you can keep your head down and stay out of cybercriminals’ targets — after all, they’re more interested in the big fish, right? Wrong. Cybercriminals don’t just target large enterprises — based on our analysis, almost two-thirds of data breach victims had under 1,000 employees1.
Most cybercriminals don’t care about the size of your business or who you are — they care about money. According to our research, over 70% of breaches were financially motivated1. And they don’t mind where they get it. Many cybercriminals don’t target their attacks at all. They take a scattergun approach, hitting the organizations with the weakest defenses.
That’s the problem. You’re facing the same threats as large enterprises, but you don’t have an enterprise-level security budget to build a state-of-the-art defense.
Cybercriminals are lucky, not smart
That doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel. Cybercriminals — from the kids operating out of their parents’ homes to sophisticated state-affiliated hackers — are still using the same old tricks to compromise organizations. Mostly, they’re playing an odds game. They don’t rely on their own smarts — they spread their nets wide and wait for you to make a basic mistake. And it’s amazing how many people are still making them.
Surely people aren’t still falling for phishing? It turns out they are. They fall for it time and time again. One in 14 users fell for phishing, and a quarter of those were duped more than once1. And people still haven’t got the message about strong passwords — over 80% of hacking-related breaches leveraged either weak and/or stolen passwords1.
Teach your employees the basics
Knowledge is the best defense
The best defense is built by thoroughly understanding your opposition. That means analyzing and learning from your own experiences of cybercrime to avoid falling for the same trick twice. It also means learning from the experience of others. The annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is based on an analysis of over 40,000 security incidents and offers an unparalleled insight into the world of cybercrime.
You can get a clearer picture of the biggest cyber threats facing your business using the DBIR’s nine attack patterns — almost 90% of the breaches investigated in the report fall into these patterns1. Understanding them can help you prioritize your defenses and mitigate your cyber risks.
1 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon
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Contact the editor: tumara.r.jordan@verizon.com