ESET’s research finds that businesses are prepared for ‘high-tech threats’ yet are struggling to manage ‘run of the mill’ scams.
According to new research carried out by ESET in the SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026, “businesses are losing sleep over a high-tech threat that has barely shown up in real attacks”, in a landscape where ‘smaller-scale’ scams are getting through and costing money, every day.
ESET, which is a Slovakia-based global cybersecurity company, partnered with Esomar member Go4insight to collect data from 4,400 organisations with 25 to 1,000 endpoints across 13 countries.
This included Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US. Contributors were the main decision-makers on, or key influencers of, organisational cybersecurity decisions.
What was discovered in the research is that more than 60pc of participating organisations dispersed across Europe, the Middle East and Africa anticipate an attack in the next year, with 44pc having already experienced an incident over the past 12 months.
