The Seriousness of Cyber Attacks on Small Businesses
So how scared should you be about a Cyber attack on your business? Well, if you’re a business, you should be pretty scared. According to Inc magazine, 60% of companies that had a Cyber attack go out of business pretty quickly, within six months. The vast majority of cyber attacks happen to small and midsize businesses. What does that mean? If you have a small, let’s say, repair shop, a store, or a restaurant, and you get a Cyber attack, more than likely the damage that’s done will not be recoverable.

The Extent of Damage from Cyber Attacks
And you might say, “Well, the damage? How much damage could there be? I’m not a tech company.” It doesn’t even matter if you’re a tech company or not. Here’s why: most of the time, the Cyber attack isn’t designed to be some type of computer infiltration. What they’re trying to do is hold you ransom. They’ll shut down any operating system you have—maybe your PO system, where you take credit cards, where you swipe people’s credit cards to sell them stuff in your store. Maybe they’ll shut down your payroll. Maybe they’ll shut down your accounts receivable, so you can’t collect money from your clients. Maybe they’ll shut down things like your CMS—your customer management system—and without those Technical Systems, you’re basically out of business.

The Cost of Ransom and Consequences
They’ll hold you for ransom and make you pay $100,000 or $200,000, depending on how big your business is. If you don’t pay them, they’ll delete all your client files, all your records, or worse, they’ll sell them on the dark web. So all your customer information is out there, and the damage can be immense. What would it be like if you had to go without any sales for two weeks or three weeks?

Consequences of Operational Downtime
Without any collecting of receivables from your clients for two or three weeks? Without being able to pay your employees for two or three weeks? Maybe without being able to buy from vendors for two or three weeks? The consequences of that are almost unrecoverable. Even if you get your stuff back, you’re going to lose customers, you’re going to lose employees, you’re going to have money out of your pocket. You may have government enforcement that comes in and says, “Look, you let your customers’ information get out into the dark web; we’re going to fine you.” So this is a very serious thing that happens.

Preventative Measures Against Cyber Attacks
Do the bare minimum of best practices to prevent it. And there are some things you can do: you can have active monitoring, you can have a response plan. We’ve talked about that in other reading materials. If you want more information, you can click the link below to get more details. But don’t be lulled into a false sense of security because you’re not a tech company or a computer company that a Cyber attack couldn’t be debilitating. Even large companies—the CDK attack from last year shut down 15,000 new car dealerships for a month.

Financial Impact on Larger and Smaller Businesses
They couldn’t sell any cars; they couldn’t even fix cars in their shop. Fortunately, new car dealerships had millions of dollars in savings in the bank, where they could kind of weather the storm, but many small businesses don’t have that much money. You live basically week to week on your income, and that could be a problem for you going forward.