Why Do Businesses Have Such a Hard Time Identifying Threats?

Why Do Businesses Have Such a Hard Time Identifying Threats?

Cybersecurity is intensely important, so a business owner would think implementing every security feature and defense would be a good idea. However, as research has shown, this can be counterproductive, as only 67% of surveyed security leaders know what led to cybersecurity incidents in their businesses over the past year. 

Let’s explore why security breaches often go unnoticed by the businesses they impact.

First Off, Breaches Can Be Hard to Notice

While one might assume that a cybersecurity issue inside their organization would be obvious, this is far from the truth. IBM reports that breaches take an average of 207 days to identify… and that’s not even counting the time it takes to discover the root cause.

It also doesn’t help that many attacks are explicitly designed to keep a low profile. Plus, many attacks now use the inherent vulnerabilities of remote operations and the Internet of Things to their advantage. These stealthier attacks can go unnoticed and obfuscate themselves amongst existing data, becoming even more challenging to find.

Second, Many Businesses Have Challenges Making the Required Investments

Many small and medium-sized businesses have tight budgets, making it more difficult for them to make the investments that modern cybersecurity standards require. Furthermore, when security issues arise, identifying the root cause is often neglected in favor of fixing the problem, so investments can frequently not be made to eliminate the risks.

Third, Many Businesses Don’t Have the IT (or Plan) Needed to Protect Themselves

Modern businesses need both the tools to detect threats proactively and the strategy to respond to them. Without the former, breaches will be far more likely to take root, and without the latter, a business will lack the means to bounce back efficiently once the threat is resolved. Either scenario (and commonly both) will hold a business back.

White Mountain IT Services is here to help New Hampshire businesses attend to their security so these kinds of breaches can be prevented. Learn more about what we can do by giving us a call at (603) 889-0800.

Related Posts

You Aren’t Too Small to Be a Cybersecurity Target

“I don’t need to worry about cyberattacks… my business is too small to be of any interest.” This brief rationalization is one of the most dangerous fallacies a modern business can make concerning cybersecurity, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern cyberthreats operate. If this has been your mindset, we urge you to read on so we can help set you on a more realistic path. Did Y...

Have You Ever Considered What a Ransomware Attack Would Do to Your Customers?

It can be too easy to look at ransomware as a business problem. After all, it attacks businesses, locking down their data for ransom, often selling it or spreading it, and sometimes altering it for the business if returning it at all. It can be too easy to overlook another impacted target in all the mess. What happens to the people whose data a business has collected and uses? The Impact of Ra...

Have You Ever Considered What a Ransomware Attack Actually Does to Your Business?

Last week, we discussed the many impacts your business suffering from ransomware has on “second-order harm,” downstream businesses, and average, ordinary people. This time, we wanted to return to “first-order harms”… those the impacted business has to deal with itself. Obviously, the First Place Ransomware Hurts is the Business When we last discussed the impacts of ransomware, we skipped over ...

Tip of the Week: Three Steps to Policing Your IT Policies

Small businesses are presented with the challenging prospect of monitoring and policing various IT-related policies that you might have for your network infrastructure and workplace technology use. The difficulty of this notion does little to lessen its importance, however. You need to take action to protect your assets, data, and reputation from the countless threats out there, and ensuring that ...