Cybercrime in Canada: The impact on SMBs

Cybercrime may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Canada, but these days cybercrime is top of mind for many Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In a recent survey of more than 1,000 people working in IT at Canadian companies with less than 500 employees, almost two-thirds (64%) said IT security and protection of business data was very important. Only two other activities were seen as more important: improving quality of products and services (68%), and growing client base and revenues (65%).

And Canadian SMBs have good reason to be concerned. The survey, conducted by Ipsos and sponsored by ESET, found that one in four Canadian SMBs with yearly revenues of $10 million or more had been hit by a cyberattack. As my colleague, Iva Peric-Lightfoot, manager of ESET Canada, put it, these SMBs have many of the same digital assets that criminals target in enterprise-level organizations, “but tend to have a lower level of protection and less sophisticated security solutions in place”.

Cybercrime in Canada: The impact on SMBs