The ITRC has released its 2023 Business Impact Report (BIR), showing a record high for small business cyberattacks, even though most respondents say they’re prepared for an attack!

According to the 2023 Business Impact Report (BIR) from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) (available for download here), there was a record high for small business cyberattacks in the three-year history of the BIR at 73 percent. Despite the record number of attacks, 85 percent of respondents said they were ready to respond to a cyber event, up from 70 percent in 2022.

Employee and consumer data continue to be the most impacted categories of information affected by a data breach. The number of organizations reporting first-time attacks was flat compared to 2022 (43 percent).

Other findings from the BIR:

• Forty-two (42) percent of small businesses lost revenue due to a cyber event. While down three percentage points from 2022, more businesses saw other increased impacts, such as more customers losing trust (32 percent), higher regrettable employee turnover (32 percent) and increased difficulty understanding what happened.
• The financial impacts of cyber breaches continued to drop compared to previous years, with more small businesses reporting losses under $250,000 and fewer reporting higher dollar-value events.
• Cyber insurance emerged as the primary source of recovery funding (33 percent), followed by cash reserves. There was a slight increase in headcount reductions (13 percent) to address data breach costs.
• Seventeen (17) percent of organizations that experienced a data breach did not send data breach notices to impacted consumers. Fifty (50) percent of those who did not send a notice said it was at the request of law enforcement, followed by 38 percent claiming no personal information was exposed. Twenty-one (21) percent said there was no risk of harm from the type of data compromised.

The 19-page PDF 2023 Business Impact Report (BIR) is split between the BIR report and the 2023 Business Impact Survey results and is (as always) chock-full of graphics and statistics. Check it out here!

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that ITRC is reporting a record high for small business cyberattacks? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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