A new global Kaspersky survey reveals that 86% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) globally and 82% in the Middle East, Turkiye, and Africa (META) region suffered at least one cyber incident in the past year.
The study highlights the primary motives of threat actors, warns of the severe consequences facing businesses, and stresses the urgent demand for purpose-built security solutions.
According to IT and security professionals polled, the most damaging cyber threats include phishing attacks, software and web application exploits, mass malware, ransomware, compromised external remote access and attacks exploiting AI vulnerabilities
Commenting on the survey, Ilya Markelov, Head of Unified Platform Product Line at Kaspersky noted that cyber incidents often inflict far more devastating consequences on small and medium-sized companies than high-profile breaches do on large corporations.
“Sometimes, it can threaten the very survival of these resource-constrained businesses, faced with diverse and intense threats, operational constraints, and specific growth objectives, SMBs urgently need scalable, purpose-built protection,” he said.
According to the survey, financial loss emerged as one of the leading consequences of the most harmful incident, cited by 22% of respondents globally and 23% in the META region. Other major impacts affecting companies included: theft of customer data, temporary disruption to client-facing services like websites and online stores, loss of control over IT infrastructure, and general business process disruption.