Research sheds little light on SME cybercrime

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 08 June 2010 08:13

Business IT - Security

More than half of all Australian small and medium enterprises have been affected by some form of computer threat in the last year -and rank cybercriminals as the biggest threat to security that they face - but at this stage it's not clear whether SMBs have suffered much material damage as a result.

Security specialist Symantec today made public the results of a survey of 510 SME 'decision makers' which found that 56 per cent had tackled some form of computer threat during 2009 - up from 46 per cent in 2007.

While it's a concerning trend, the report failed to ask the companies about the impact of the computer threats they had experienced.  While it confirms the majority of small businesses had faced a computer based threat, the survey, which was conducted by Bread and Butter Research, does not reveal whether that was a mere nuisance or had a more serious consequence for the businesses surveyed.

'We didn't ask that as a question,' Steve Martin, director of SMB in the Pacific region for the company acknowledged. 'We would like to do it again and work out what were the implications of that.'

Certainly the claim that 22 per cent of all emails received by SMBs were spam suggests an element of time wasting, but the survey did not attempt to quantify the impact of cyberthreats on such businesses.

Where the researchers did ask the companies about instances where they had lost data in the last year hardware failure or systems corruption were in fact identified as the major villains accounting for 58 per cent of cases where data was lost and could not be recovered. Virus infections were blamed in 11 per cent of cases.

According to Detective Superintendent Brian Hay, a member of the Queensland Police's fraud and computer crime group, small and medium business are increasingly being targeted online. He said that in recent times a number of small businesses had fallen foul of online overpayment scams where they had been contacted via email and been 'prepaid' for services to be delivered.