Everyday, there are 65,000 daily attempts to hack SMEs and around 4,500 successful hacks every day. That's almost one in three small UK businesses who are successfully hacked every year.

To put this in perspective, this means a small UK business is hacked every 19 seconds.

This is all according to research conducted by Hiscox back in 2018. Since then, it's estimated that businesses faced a 20% rise in cyber security threats in 2020. it's predicted this was a result of the pandemic and the large shift to remote working.

What is the real cost of a data breach?

These statistics show the risk your business faces and the likelihood you could fall victim to a hacking attempt. A successful cyber attack can cause major damage to your organisation. It can affect your income, as well as your business reputation and customer trust.

The impact of a security breach can be broadly defined by three categories.

• Financial
• Legal
• Reputational

Financial cost of cyber attack

Significant revenue loss as a result of a security breach is seriously common. Studies show that 29% of businesses that face a data breach end up losing revenue. Of those that lose revenue, 38% experienced a loss of 20% or more.

Business Reputation

Would you give your personal information to a company who has a history of data breaches? Would you trust them to hold your details securely, or would you rather choose a different company with a better reputation?

In the UK, 44% consumers will hesitate to do business with a breached organisation for several months, and 41% will never return.

Customer trust is a fundamental part of building and maintaining customer relationships. A damage to your business reputation because of a cyber-attack could lead to:

• Loss of customers
• Loss of sales
• Reduction in profits

The damage to your reputation can also affect your relationships with suppliers and investors.

Legal Consequences

By law, your business must manage the security of all personal data you hold. Both customers and staff. If this data is compromised (unintentional or not) – and it’s proven you failed to deploy appropriate security measures – you could face fines and regulatory sanctions.

Take Equifax, for example. They paid $575 million in fines after losing the personal and financial information of nearly 150 million people. The data breach was due to an unpatched Apache Struts framework in one of its databases, and the company had failed to fix the vulnerability months after the patch had been discovered. They also failed to inform the public of the breach for weeks after it had been discovered.

Why you should act now

Cyber attackers don’t stop. Instead, they evolve and constantly learn new tricks. If you haven’t tested your security for several months, you’re even more susceptible to attacks than before. With remote/hybrid working being a permanent working arrangement for many businesses, now is the time to test your system for vulnerabilities and make sure your systems are still protected even when your staff are using devices remotely. The purpose of a security test is to identify all possible loopholes and weaknesses of the software system which might result in a cyber attack or data breach.

PSP-IT: We Make IT Happen

Do you need your systems or applications testing for any security vulnerabilities? Perhaps you have just implemented a new system and you want to make sure it matches all your initial requirements.

PSP-IT has provided bespoke solutions to organisations across the world for more than a decade. In that time, the testing phase has always been one of the most important parts of our service. We are skilled at taking an application, identifying any pitfalls and exploring how functionality and usability can be improved.

With knowledge in both manual testing and automated testing, our testing captures a complete overview of the application; from its security, code, APIs and how it feels from an end-user perspective.

Visit our Outsourced Software Testing page, or contact us for more information.