Over 50,000 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises(SMEs) are on the verge of collapsing to a cyber attack says a research conducted by Gallagher. The Illinois based Insurance and Risk Management company concluded after gathering viewpoints from over 1000 respondents of Managerial Level operating in more than 250 UK Firms.
Estimates suggest that last year more than 1.4 million businesses were hit by a cyber-attack costing them a combined £8.8 billion loss. If the percentage ratio is taken into account nearly a quarter of firms were reported to be affected by the said crisis giving it a 5% increase from the previous year.
Gallagher says that the average cost of the attacks was around £6400, where 17% of SMEs were forced to spend £10K or more to reciprocate the loss of the incident. However, the suggested numbers are just an estimate and might increase in real-time.
The insurance company says that in the event of a coordinated cyber attack more than 50K SMEs are at the risk to collapse emphatically in this year.
“In today’s UK economy, most of the funding is done by private sector firms like SMEs which are reported to be vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as data breaches and ransomware”, says Paul Bassett, the MD of Crisis Management, Gallagher.
And the only way enterprises can thwart such threats is through government’s full-scale support like offering 24/7 crisis response via consultants, post-incident counseling, and business recovery advice along with last but not the least emergency funding.
