Small and medium sized businesses are exposed to the risks of cyber-attack or data loss in many ways. This Scott-Moncrieff report says, 75% of SMEs regularly make BACS payments to suppliers. What they may not know is that if any fraud occurs in relation to these payments – say the money doesn’t go where it should have – the SME carries the cost. Unlike with credit card payments, banks make no guarantees around recovery.

“Our research finds that 70% of SMEs use email to send business-critical information,” says Fraser Nicol, a partner at Scott-Moncrieff and an IT risk expert. “Email is unencrypted, so using it to send business-critical information creates an automatic vulnerability.”

The report also finds how SMEs are responding.