Two bills passed the House last week to protect the small business community from cyber threats. Is it enough?
Cyber Week at the White House was a step in the right direction in protecting small business, as the House passed legislation last week to help combat the growing number of online threats. One major drawback: The legislation doesn’t educate the small business community.
Two bipartisan bills—Protecting Cyber Networks Act and National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act—encourage businesses to share information about threats with federal investigators. This is in an effort to track cybercriminals and, hopefully, prevent future attacks.
It’s not enough, small business advocates said during a hearing held by the House Small Business Committee last week. While this legislation, as well as more proposals that are still up for vote, bring the larger issue of cybersecurity to the forefront, it doesn’t do enough to prevent attacks.
In essence, hackers will hack, so the government should teach and provide guidelines to small businesses on how to detect and handle attacks.
It’s no secret that small- and medium-sized companies are big targets. In a recent survey, half of the small business respondents said they have been a victim of a cyberattack, and the average cost of dealing with these attacks has jumped to $20,752 per attack from $8,699 two years ago.
Jane LeClair, chief operating officer at the National Cybersecurity Institute at Excelsior College, said at the hearing that many small businesses don’t notice attacks right away because they aren’t actively monitoring their data. “Often, small businesses don’t even know they have been attacked until it is too late.”
