The survey included 600 small and medium sized companies. The survey finding are mind boggling and atrocious.

According to the details of the survey, around 70% of companies accepted that they had fallen victim to cyber crimes last year (2009). All the survey participants (precise 95%) acknowledged that they had been affected by spam, 51% affected by computer virus infection, 54% affected by phishing attacks and 13% by credit card fraud.

Due to these attacks, 88% companies decided to use antivirus software as the preferred protection tool, 74% used spam-filtering software and 71% installed hardware firewalls. 10% of survey participants hired an IT professional to take care of their security, with an additional 17% used IT supplier for their security.

Commenting on the findings, Mark Fielding, Head of ISME, said that the results exhibited dramatic rise in the cyber criminals activities with the surging attacks on SMEs across the country, as reported by irishexaminer on June 7, 2010.

Owing to the rising threat, companies are forced to expense thousands of Euros to deal with these activities, said Fielding.

He further added that in some cases, firms were completely unaware of these activities and exposed themselves to external attacks. Internet remained an important but unregulated area. SMEs should be confident that there were some structures implemented to support them and procedures were in place to help businesses report e-crimes. These were important to increase the prosecutions.

The problem of cyber crime is not just disturbing Ireland, but other regions also affected by them. In fact, it is a global phenomenon causing worry to all the SMEs worldwide. A similar survey was conducted by Symantec Corporation (an Internet security company) in Australia which showed that a large number of small and medium sized companies had become victim of cyber crime in 2009, with nearly 56% companies affected against 46% in 2008.