Should small businesses pay for cybersecurity training?

The answer is a definitive yes. Small businesses need cybersecurity training for their teams even if they don’t consider themselves potential victims of a cyber attack. Over the last couple of years, small businesses have become an increasing target for malicious actors, and the data agrees:

• 73% of small businesses have experienced a cybersecurity incident

• 37% of ransomware victims are businesses with fewer than 100 employees
• Small business employees experience 350% more social engineering attacks than larger enterprises

Considering that approximately 87% of small businesses directly or indirectly collect customer data that could be compromised during attacks, and around 27% of small businesses with no cybersecurity protections collect customers’ credit card information, a cyber attack could have catastrophic effects.

With small businesses and their employees increasingly facing cybersecurity threats on all fronts, including social engineering, phishing, malware attacks—and more—buying a cybersecurity training package tailored towards small businesses has become essential.

Cyber-attacks: how small businesses are targeted

Small businesses and their employees can often be targets of different types of cyber attacks, including:

Phishing

Phishing is a type of cyber attack aimed at conning unsuspecting people into divulging sensitive information, downloading malicious files, or giving control of their devices to bad actors. Phishing can take different forms, including these common types:

1. Spear phishing: attacks targeted at a specific person or entity within an organization with the intent to steal their login credentials.
2. Vishing: also known as ‘voice phishing.’ This attack is aimed at stealing the victim’s sensitive information by mimicking friends, coworkers, close relatives, or other trusted allies.
3. Email phishing: perhaps the most common type of phishing attack aimed at luring unsuspecting email recipients into clicking unsafe links and/or providing sensitive information. Such emails always leverage urgency and familiarity to get victims to act.
4. Social engineering: attacks leverage publicly available information on social media to target unsuspecting victims. It encourages users to share seemingly innocent, yet sensitive information commonly asked during two-factor authentication like the streets they grew up on, their first teacher’s middle name, mother’s maiden name and more.

Malware injection or intrusion

Malware, also known as malicious software, is any program or code designed to cause harm or manipulate a computer, network, or server. Bad actors often leverage social engineering and/or phishing techniques to prompt small business owners and/or their employees to deploy these codes or programs on their devices. Once injected, the malware can be used to facilitate data theft, manipulate computers, or launch other forms of attacks.

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks

Denial of service (DoS) attacks flood and overwhelm the victim’s network with false requests aimed at disrupting their business operations. During such attacks, users are unable to perform simple, routine and necessary tasks like website visits, email checks and more due to their network compromise.

Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks

Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks are designed to intercept communication and traffic between network users and web applications. This information collection attack listens for sensitive data like personal data, login credentials, credit card information, banking details and more. The attack can also be used to impersonate individuals to carry out fraudulent actions or transactions. 

Impact of cyber attacks on small businesses

Reputational damage

About 55% of consumers admit they’d be less likely to continue doing business with companies that have been victims of data breaches.

Given the above statistics, small business owners are likely to lose over half of their customer base due to bad actors if they fail to protect themselves.

Ransoms and financial losses

The financial implications of cyber attacks on small businesses can be immense. In most cases, bad actors leverage control over systems, data, networks and servers to demand ransoms.

StrongDM’s alarming cybersecurity statistics for 2025 reported:

• About 95% of cybersecurity incidents affecting small businesses are estimated to cost between $826 to $653,587
• Over 50% of small businesses reported their websites were down for eight to 24 hours during an attack
• Over 50% of small businesses reported it took more than 24 hours to recover from a cyber attack

In addition to the cost incurred in ransoms, small business owners also face an additional system restoration cost–the cost of replacing the corrupted network, software, or toolset. 

Forensic investigations and legal costs

Following a breach, small businesses may need to hire legal counsel to assess the legal implications of the attack and protect themselves. In addition to this, they may also need to hire forensic investigation experts to identify the source of the attack, categorize the threat level and formulate or implement a recovery plan.

How to prevent small business cyber attacks

Your organization is only as strong as its weakest link. At CIRA, we understand that your business requires the right human shield to keep systems, networks and information safe from bad actors. To achieve this, we offer robust yet affordable Cybersecurity Awareness Training for Small Teams.

At $50/user annually, you get a fully managed service that takes care of your cybersecurity training pipeline and equips your employees with everything they need to spot, report and avert threats to your organization. Our cybersecurity training module also includes the following:

• Automated phishing simulations
• Gamified experience with a cybersecurity risk score
• Easy-to-use administrator dashboard
• Four short online training modules tailored for small teams
• A risk advisor for up-to-date identification of specific cyber risks
• Refresher training to keep your team cyber-aware and protected.

Here’s a quick tour of our Cybersecurity awareness training module for small teams.