Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been warned to not underestimate threats to their security, in light of a report by McAfee.
Most of those surveyed did not think they were a prime target for attack.
Just under half (46 per cent) did not think an attack on them would make a cybercriminal money, while just over half (52 per cent) thought they were too small to be noticed.
This was reflected in the fact that 43 per cent just used their IT equipment’s default settings and didn’t customise security.
However, nearly a third of the businesses had been attacked at least four times in the past three years, with a quarter of those attacks taking a week to recover from.
‘Just because a business is small does not mean that it is immune to security threats,’ said McAfee’s senior vice president of the mid-market segment, Darrell Rodenbaugh.
‘For businesses of all sizes, viruses, hacker intrusions, spyware and spam can lead to lost or stolen data, computer downtime, decreased productivity, compliance issues, lost sales and even loss of reputation.’
Time management was also considered to be a factor in SMBs poor security practices, with 42 per cent having less than an hour to spend on security.
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