Fewer cyber attacks on small businesses

Large companies are significantly more affected by cyber attacks than small companies. But both incur a lot of costs as a result of incidents.

Statistics Netherlands reports this on the basis of its annual report Cybersecurity monitor. This occurred in 39 percent of companies with 250 or more employees. But in companies with 2 to 10 employees, 9 percent were confronted with an IT incident caused externally in 2016.

Furthermore, the Cybersecurity Monitor 2018 shows that small companies with 2 to 10 employees suffered 6 percent from outages as a result of external cyber attacks. For companies with 250 or more employees, this figure was 23 percent in 2016.

The CBS study also shows that industry and the ICT sector are mainly targeted: 12 and 10 percent respectively suffered from cyber attacks. Small businesses in the catering industry (6 percent) and health and social care (5 percent) were less likely to be victims.

ICT incidents in smaller companies often have an internal cause; Statistics Netherlands states that 2 out of 3 incidents have such a crater. Furthermore, 7 percent of the companies surveyed report an IT incident to one or more authorities. This could, for example, be the police, the Dutch Data Protection Authority, a security team or a bank.

In the field of prevention, small companies lag behind large companies. 60 percent of small businesses are taking three or more of the requested measures. For companies with 250 or more employees, this is 98 percent.