{"id":223377,"date":"2026-06-01T06:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T10:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/01\/cybersecurity-for-smes-a-danger-that-is-all-too-often-overlooked\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T06:10:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T10:10:22","slug":"cybersecurity-for-smes-a-danger-that-is-all-too-often-overlooked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/01\/cybersecurity-for-smes-a-danger-that-is-all-too-often-overlooked\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity for SMEs: a danger that is all too often overlooked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cybersecurity for SMEs: a danger that is all too often overlooked<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/visionarymarketing.com\/en\/2026\/06\/01\/cybersecurity-for-smes-a-danger-that-is-all-too-often-overlooked\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-01 06:07:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: visionarymarketing.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. Herv\u00e9 Kabla, with whom I co-authored several books, has just published a book on cybersecurity for SMEs. The CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook tackles a subject that many small business leaders still prefer to ignore. Not out of bad faith, but out of a stubborn conviction: that they are too small to be of interest to anyone. That conviction is precisely what makes them such attractive targets. I invited Herv\u00e9 to talk about the book on camera at the Visionary Marketing studio.SME Cybersecurity: The Ominous Threat They\u2019d All Rather IgnoreThe SME: the Ideal Target for Cyber AttacksThe book opens with an observation that might seem blunt \u2014 were the reality not even harsher than the words.\u201cThey have become, in just a few years, the preferred target of cybercriminals, precisely because they are fast, trusted, and often under protected.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 9The transcript of Herv\u00e9\u2019s talk confirms the diagnosis with equal candour: SMEs invest neither the technical means nor the awareness efforts required, and cyber attackers \u201cknow this only too well.\u201dWhat has changed is the nature of the attack itself. For a long time, cybercrime relied on manual targeting and deliberate intent. Today, attackers run automated sweeps of the internet on a massive scale, scanning for open vulnerabilities.\u201cIn the digital age, opportunity replaces intent.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 19Nobody is singling you out. You are simply exposed, and that is enough.Three Budget Lines, a Few Tens of Thousands of EurosOne of the questions SME leaders ask most often is also the simplest: what does it cost? Herv\u00e9\u2019s answer is precise. A cybersecurity budget for an SME amounts to \u201caround a few tens of thousands of euros\u201d and breaks down into three areas: technical solutions (software and hardware), an appropriate cyber insurance policy, and staff training and awareness. This trio is consistent with what the book develops at length: the technical vulnerability and the human vulnerability are two sides of the same problem, and you cannot fix one without addressing the other.The book also puts a figure on the cost of unpreparedness.\u201cThe average cost of a data breach for an SMB in 2024 hovers around $150,000 to $250,000 \u2014 often more than a full year of IT budget.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 30The arithmetic is unforgiving.Cybersecurity: Who Is Concerned at SME Leadership Level?Herv\u00e9 Kabla\u2019s answer to this question leaves little room for ambiguity: everyone. The IT security manager, obviously. The CEO, because it is he or she who \u201cmust answer for the company\u2019s reputation\u201d before employees, clients and shareholders when the crisis hits. And the staff, because a single human lapse is all it takes to open the door.\u201cFor small and midsize businesses, where roles overlap and processes are more informal, the human factor is not just one risk among others: it is the foundation on which all others rest.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 61CEO fraud \u2014 messages that mimic the style or voice of a senior executive to trigger an urgent wire transfer \u2014 is the most common illustration of this. It is not technology that gives way in those cases; it is psychology, weaponised.AI Is Changing the Game, and Not in the Victims\u2019 FavourOne chapter of the book addresses head-on the impact of artificial intelligence on the threat landscape. Generative tools now make it possible to write phishing emails without a single spelling mistake, to clone an executive\u2019s voice from a brief audio sample, and to build fake login pages that reproduce the fonts and logos of the targeted company right down to the last pixel. The telltale signs that once allowed people to spot a fraud attempt \u2014 approximate English, a pixellated logo \u2014 have all but disappeared.Herv\u00e9 sums up the fundamental asymmetry of the situation with a line that applies across every sector.\u201cAttackers need to succeed once, defenders every time.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 19For an SME with a lean team and less formalised processes than a large corporation, that asymmetry is particularly hard to absorb.Resilience Rather Than InvulnerabilityWhat Herv\u00e9\u2019s book ultimately seeks to convey is not a catalogue of technical solutions. It is a change of posture. SME cybersecurity cannot rest on the assumption that incidents will be avoided; it must rest on the capacity to survive them and get back to business. Herv\u00e9 borrows an analogy from aviation to illustrate the point.\u201cThink of an airplane. Every critical system \u2014 hydraulics, avionics, fuel pumps \u2014 has a twin. Nobody calls that waste; it\u2019s the reason why we can fly safely. Don\u2019t you think your company\u2019s data deserves the same respect?\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, p. 75This resilience logic applies to communication as well. The book draws on several real cases, including that of a regional accounting firm whose client renewal rate dropped by 30% after a data leak, despite a responsible handling of the incident. Transparency has a cost, Herv\u00e9 acknowledges, but silence costs more.A Book for the Technical and the Non-Technical AlikeThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook is deliberately aimed at two audiences. Technical readers will find arguments to defend the security budget internally, against leaders who believe the threat does not concern them. Non-technical readers will discover that the question is not whether their company will be attacked, but in what shape it will be when the attack comes.\u201cEvery small business has already been tested by cybercrime \u2014 it just may not know it yet.\u201d
\nThe CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook, Leadership Takeaway #3That conviction, in fact, runs through the entire book, stated in the transcript of Herv\u00e9\u2019s talk with a clarity that leaves no room for interpretation: \u201cEvery company has been, and will be, hit by a cyberattack.\u201d For SME leaders who still think this kind of book is written for someone else, that may well be the most useful sentence in it.About Herv\u00e9 KablaHerv\u00e9 Kabla is a major European digital player. He led Be Angels, the agency he co-founded, for many years before taking on responsibilities across several media and digital communications organisations. A prolific blogger, speaker and lecturer, he was my co-author on Mastering Digital Marketing Like a Boss (Kawa, 2014) and several other titles in the Like a boss collection we co-founded together. The CEO\u2019s Cybersecurity Playbook continues that tradition of rigorous, accessible writing for business leaders.<\/p>\n

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Cybersecurity for SMEs: a danger that is all too often overlooked https:\/\/visionarymarketing.com\/en\/2026\/06\/01\/cybersecurity-for-smes-a-danger-that-is-all-too-often-overlooked\/ Publish Date: 2026-06-01…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/visionarymarketing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/h-kabla-cybersecu-bouquin00-00-03-14still005.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,20,30,24,25,27],"class_list":["post-223377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-breach","tag-cybersecurity","tag-phishing","tag-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223377"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223381,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223377\/revisions\/223381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}