4 Of 10 Small/Medium Businesses in the US Are Not Secure

Darknet recently reported the results of a recent survey of 455 small and medium-sized businesses in the United States:

• "42% do not consider their networks to be secure
• 32% have suffered a breach over the past 12 months
• 96% and 93% have anti-virus software and firewalls; 80% have anti-spam products
• 71% say downtime and security issues are their main daily IT concerns
• 51% identify user support as a major daily concern
• 39% say email viruses are the greatest security risk
• 55% spend 10% or less of their IT budget on security measures
• 77% say this budget is enough to cover their security requirements
• 48% believe that better awareness on security among employees would improve the level of security while 25% want senior management to be more aware of security issues"

Of the 32% that reported a breach, the breach was caused:

"mainly due to a virus attack (69%), followed by infected internet downloads (30%) and loss of hardware, e.g. laptops (24%). Only 2% reported a breach involving some form of fraud or identity threat."

The survey was conducted in October 2007 by eMediaUSA for GFI Software. The survey respondents were senior executives or senior IT administrators. Download full survey results and methodology (Adobe PDF).