Nearly 45% of Canadian SMEs have been the target of a random cyberattack in the past year, according to a recent survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).
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27% of these companies also suffered a targeted attack during this same period.
“Cyberattacks are a growing threat to SMEs. Strengthening cybersecurity can seem complex and specialized services are often expensive for SMEs, “said Jasmin Guénette, vice-president of National Affairs at CFIB, in a press release Thursday.
About 11% of businesses have been targeted by attempted whaling, which involves targeting an SME owner or impersonating them in a fraud.
The professional services and wholesale industries are the most likely to have been victims of a cyberattack, with 57% and 58% of the random attacks listed, respectively.
Despite the ever-increasing emergence of this type of fraud, only 11% of companies have provided mandatory cybersecurity awareness training to their employees.
The survey was conducted online with 4,639 CFIB members from October 6 to October 31, 2022.
Expertise related to the protection of organizational data is increasingly in demand, so much so that the Université du Québec à Rimouski is launching four graduate programs in cybersecurity.
Two specialized graduate degrees and two short graduate programs in data science and cybersecurity will be offered in the fall of 2023 at the Rimouski and Lévis campuses.
The programs aim to train IT professionals to better equip them on the protection of equipment and the detection of vulnerabilities.
“Computer systems are more and more complex, then to protect these systems, to protect the information especially of the customers, we said to ourselves that it was necessary to create a program which was specialized and oriented because everything in cybersecurity, you have to be proactive. You don’t just have to intervene when the breach is discovered, you really have to protect yourself in advance. This requires knowledge,” explained the director of the computer program committee at the University of Quebec at Rimouski, Professor Yacine Yaddaden.
– with information from Simon Gamache-Fortin, TVA Nouvelles
