ESET Security Executive Tells Small Firms to Treat Cyber as Business Risk

Small business owners should stop treating cybersecurity as an IT issue and start treating it as a business risk, Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET, said in an interview published by Small Business Trends on October 7.

Anscombe, who has worked in technology and security for about 30 years, said artificial intelligence is accelerating the discovery of software flaws and widening the patching burden on firms with thin IT staffing. He pointed to Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday releases, which he said carried between 150 and 200 fixes per month in the first three months of the year and reached 974 in September.

He said companies that assume they are too small to be targeted are exposed because they sit inside larger supply chains. Citing the Jaguar Land Rover cyber incident, Anscombe said the attack halted production across plants in multiple countries, cost just under £2 billion, and involved 5,000 small businesses that collectively laid off nearly 300,000 people. The entry point, he said, was a compromised service provider.

Anscombe said owners should ask whether they can monitor systems around the clock and whether they have trained security analysts available, noting that an intrusion beginning at 2 a.m. on a Saturday can give attackers two days inside a Monday-to-Friday business. He said managed detection and response does not have to carry enterprise pricing and that ESET has repackaged its MDR offering.

This story was first reported by Small Business Trends.