How Small Businesses Can Fight a Growing Wave of Cyber Crime
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Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, August 10th. I'm Kate Bullivant for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, we're going to talk about how a surge in cyber attacks is increasingly hitting small businesses, the backbone of the US economy. It comes as the number of overall cyber attacks are ramping up, thanks to more sophisticated ransomware and escalating geopolitical tensions with countries such as China and Russia. In just the past few months, we've reported how Microsoft was hit by, quote, active attacks targeting its server software, as well as the U.S.
government warning companies to watch for increased cyber attacks linked to the conflict with Iran. And while we often hear about how cyber attacks are hitting large businesses, the impact these attacks are having on mom and pop shops can be overlooked.
There are constantly people, you know, trying to do these scams all the time. It said that they need me to secure my account or I will lose access to it. I get emotional because this took a huge financial burden on my family and myself. It was the worst week of my life. We literally sat there crying and just responding to people for days and days and days. It felt like an eternity.
According to a forthcoming survey from Mastercard, looking at over 5,000 small and medium-sized businesses across four continents, nearly half of business owners have experienced a cyber attack on their current business. And nearly one in five that suffered an attack then filed for bankruptcy or closed their business. At the same time, the World Economic Forum reports that a split is emerging regarding the resilience of small organisations to cyberhacks compared with how their larger counterparts weathered the storm. To explore what's going on here and why small businesses are an appealing target for cyberhackers, I'm joined by Journal cybersecurity reporter James Rundle. as well as Siong Jun, who's the lead cyber analyst at a security intelligence provider, Dragonfly, which is part of Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones.
James, I want to start by asking you, how much of a critical issue has cybercrime become for small and medium businesses?
Cybercrime has moved from a background risk to a constant threat for small and medium sized businesses.
How widespread is the surge in cyber attacks against small businesses?
And the big driver behind that is scale. So in the past, an attack required planning, patience, a pretty high degree of technical skill. But today, artificial intelligence and automation have really lowered the barrier to entry. So an attacker with the right tools, which you can easily find on the dark net or even rent from cyber criminal gangs, can generate tailored phishing campaigns that are customized to imitate or target specific people. They can craft malware. They can scan thousands of systems for weaknesses with very little technical know-how. And that means attackers can hit hundreds of targets at once. So small businesses are facing this critical issue and they're not being singled out because they're suddenly more interesting.
It's because they're caught in the nets due to the mechanization of cybercrime making everyone a target.
And Siyong, what are you seeing?
In my monitoring of these cybercrime and ransomware groups, something that is quite surprising is seeing how many small and medium-sized businesses appear in their victims list, even though for these major cybercrime groups these wouldn't seem like obvious targets.
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