Even as cybersecurity remains one of the top threats, protection against the same is surprisingly not a major issue for UK-based small and midsized business (SMBs). Cybersecurity company Duo Security recently conducted a new research with YouGov and 1,009 senior decision makers across the UK were surveyed to determine how much they are spending on cybersecurity.
One of the objectives of the survey was to find out whether government initiatives such as Cyber Essentials and Cyber Risk Aware have been effective at protecting SMBs from cyber threats. The survey found out that 36 percent of UK small businesses are putting their online safety on risk by operating at or below the “security poverty line”.
This year, 38 percent of small businesses had spent nothing to protect themselves from cybersecurity threats, the survey revealed, while 30 percent of respondents said that less than 3 percent of their overall budget was allocated for cybersecurity.
Forty-five percent of respondents do not see themselves to be possible victims for hackers. Wendy Nather, Principal Security Strategist at Duo Security, said, “When an organization is IT-poor, it is subjected to a number of complex dynamics that keep it from implementing effective security. Simply lowering the price point on security products is not enough; they need expertise, resources, and influence on the vendors that supply their systems and software. Moreover, small businesses may not be able to tell whether they’ve been breached if they don’t have proper security monitoring in place; this prevents them, and us, from grasping the full scope of the problem.”
