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A recent research report by McAfee has revealed that security breaches at SMBs across verticals have costed $41k on an average in the last year. The primary culprit for this is reduced spending on the security measures by corporates and government companies. Organizations of varied size from 51 to 1,000 employees are exercising the budget cut due to various reasons, the recession being the primary reason. Owing to their cut in the security budget, their network security suffers drastically from cyber attacks which lead to huge revenue loss for these companies. Sufficient security spending is essential to prevent cyber attacks against companies. Also equally important measure is to have good planning from the administration's part to effectively prevent these attacks to protect your assets.

The McAfee's study titled “The Security Paradox' reports that about 63% of respondents representing Indian companies have suffered from more security breach related incidents in the past year. And, 94% of Indian companies surveyed are concerned about being a target of cybercrime, while 70% of the Indian companies spent more than a day on recovering from IT security attacks! In the global scenario, one in five medium scale enterprises around the world has had a single incident that cost an average of US$41K as loss of revenue.

These alarming findings clearly exhibit that compromising on security spending is not advisable even during the recessionary period, because upgraded security measures are similar to safety lock in a treasure house. It simply reminds the age old phrase that prevention is better than cure. Kartik Shahani, Regional Director for India, McAfee, said: “Companies in India are becoming increasingly aware of the threats of IT security attacks. It's heartening to see that a significant number of organisations have increased their budgets in 2009 on IT security despite the downward pressure on finances and resources.” He further said, “Organisations that put more effort on preventing attacks can end up spending less than a third as much as those that allow themselves to be at risk. Hence, adopting preventive security measures should be taken as a serious concern by every organisation.”

There is a general myth particularly among small-size companies that hackers prefer to target larger companies only. But the survey has clearly broken the myth as shown by the research results among the companies of various scales. About 43% of global organisations surveyed are under the impression that large scale companies with 501+ employees are most at risk for a security attack, but in reality as revealed by the McAfee fidings, organisations with less than 500 employees actually suffer from more attacks on average. The fundamental problem among most organisations particularly with smaller companies is that they wrongly assume that cyber criminals will never attack them because an attacker will not find value in targeting them.

Companies of all size need to realize that cyber attacks are for the purpose of gaining in competitive areas, such as software development, or simply personal relationships, so organizations of all size need to be proactive in protecting their asset by spending right amount of money on security measures and having good administration planning in place.

India Specific Key Findings

* 81% of the Indian organisations spend less than four hours a week on IT security proactively

* 70% spend more than a day recovering from IT security attacks 94% of the Indian companies are very concerned about being target of cyber crime

* India (35%) and China (32%) have the largest amount of unreported data leaks

* 63% of companies witnessed an increase in IT security incidents from 2008 to 2009

* 73% of companies fear that a serious data breach could put their organization to out of business

* An Indian company spends an average of $28,447 per year in combating various types of IT security attacks

Kannan K

kannan@cybermedia.co.in