Indian small and medium-sized businesses are putting more money into cybersecurity as attacks become harder to ignore. The Tata Tele Business Services-CyberMedia Research found that 84 per cent of SMEs plan to increase cybersecurity spending over the next 12–24 months. For many SMEs, the planned increase in spending follows direct experience with cyberattacks, with 40 per cent reporting an incident in the past two years.
Another report from Kaspersky points to the wider threat, with 87 per cent of Indian SMBs surveyed reporting a cyber incident in the past year. Across APAC, phishing, software vulnerability exploitation and mass malware were among the most common threats, while a lack of employee awareness and security expertise remained key risks.
The Tata Tele Business Services-CMR research also reported that only 28 per cent of SMEs that experienced an incident made structural changes to their security, while just 12 per cent continuously monitor their cybersecurity environment.
Kaspersky’s findings indicate that smaller businesses are increasingly facing the same broad range of cyber threats as larger enterprises. The company says that the idea that smaller organisations can stay below the radar of cybercriminals is becoming less relevant as businesses digitise and the cost of launching attacks falls.
The Kaspersky survey covered IT security specialists across SMBs and enterprises in 18 countries. On average, organisations in the APAC region experienced three different types of security incidents over the past year. For SMBs, the most frequently encountered incidents were software vulnerability exploitation, phishing and mass malware attacks. Software vulnerability exploitation accounted for 20 per cent, followed by phishing at 19 per cent and mass malware attacks at 18 per cent. Even zero-day exploits, which ranked lowest among the listed incident types, were encountered by 6 per cent of organisations.
India recorded an incident rate of 87 per cent among SMBs surveyed by Kaspersky. Vietnam reported the highest rate in the region at 97 per cent, followed by Malaysia at 95 per cent and Indonesia at 92 per cent. Thailand and China reported lower rates of 82 per cent and 67 per cent, respectively.
