More home office leads to cybercrime

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In the home office, the number has risen by 60 percent since the lockdown compared to the beginning of the year. However, despite the flexibility of SMEs, the risks of home office and digitization are underestimated by many. Although a quarter of Swiss SMEs have already been the victim of a serious cyber attack, a good two-thirds of SMEs neither conduct regular employee training on cyber security nor have a security concept in place. This is the conclusion of a study by the market research institute GFS-Zurich.

From August to October 2020, GFS-Zurich surveyed 503 CEOs of small companies (4 to 49 employees) in German-, French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland on the impact of the Corona pandemic on digitization.

Key results:

• For one-third of SMEs, home office was not an option during the lockdown due to the location-bound nature of the work, while the remaining two-thirds were able to move jobs to home office without significant problems thanks to the modern infrastructure. The number of employees working from home almost quadrupled during the lockdown, rising from 10 percent to 38 percent on average.
• With the lockdown, online conferencing tools in particular have become more important: The share of virtual meetings has more than doubled from 9 percent to 20 percent, he said. Private communication channels such as WhatsApp and other messenger services are also on the rise again.
• A quarter of Swiss SMEs was already the victim of a momentous CyberattackOf the approximately 38,250 SMEs attacked throughout Switzerland, around one third (12,930 SMEs) suffered financial damage and one in ten suffered reputational damage.
• Preventive measures, however, are too rarely taken: Despite the frequent cyberattacks only every second SME a Emergency plan for ensuring the continuation of business and around two-thirds neither conduct regular employee training nor would they have implemented a security concept in the company.

However, people are still considered a risk factor, because cyber risks are often underestimated: Only just under half (47 percent) of CEOs said they were well informed about security-related issues. Even more drastic is the lack of awareness of becoming a victim of a cyber attack themselves: Only 11 percent consider the risk of being put out of action for a day by a cyber attack to be high, as the study further concludes.

See the full JRC-Zurich final report. 

The survey was conducted on behalf of Digitalswitzerland, Mobiliar, the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), the School of Business at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW).

Source: Swiss Mobiliar