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It’s one of the most common crimes against business these days. It costs about $14 billion annually in this country and it is not getting any better.
This is Cyber Security Month. This topic gets its own month these days because of its growing importance to commercial operations. Representing about one per cent of total sales for Canadian enterprises – this is big business.
Companies spend roughly $8 billion on specialized employees or consultants and another $6 billion in technology and recovery costs.
About one-in-five Canadian enterprises has had a cyber security incident, which means the big ones like Facebook or major retail chains are not the only targets. This can lead to downtime – about 60 per cent of businesses affected experienced this problem – or it can result in client information being compromised. This takes the business into a completely new realm, one of privacy and data security.
One place for average businesses to start addressing this issue is to create a written cyber-attack plan. Only 13 per cent of Canadian companies have one and about half have regularly scheduled risk assessments.
