Fight against cyber crime against SMEs

The Dutch cabinet in 2014 launched a scheme aimed at rendering SMEs less susceptible to being duped by cyber criminals. The idea was to achieve this by introducing a “secure Internet for SMEs” quality mark. Each year the Dutch economy suffers cyber crime-inflicted losses of some 8.8 billion euros, much of which is accounted for by criminals who practise hacking and phishing in order illicitly to retrieve sensitive information and cash. The upshot may well be an upsurge in insurance premiums for on-line risks. 

The Ministry of Economic Affairs recently announced, however, that the launch of a “secure Internet for SMEs” quality mark would involve too many aspects, from e-mail and cloud security to data processing and from patch management to web site hackability, in addition to which the diversity of the SME sector had simply been found to be too great to enable a single quality mark to produce enough of a result.

Even though the “secure Internet for SMEs” quality mark plans have thus had to be abandoned, this by no means has made the government lose gumption in its fight against cyber crime. Making the Internet safer for SMEs in particular is still a priority, and has now been dubbed the “Cybersecurity for SMEs” initiative providing small and medium-sized business owners with critical advice.