Canadian SMB & MUSH Cybersecurity Statistics: A 2026 Readiness Snapshot
Canadian SMB and MUSH cybersecurity statistics point to one uncomfortable through-line: the organizations with the least security capacity are carrying a growing share of the risk. This snapshot pulls the most recent public numbers from Statistics Canada, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security into one Canadian, SMB- and MUSH-focused view — every figure sourced, so you can cite it.
The baseline: incidents are common, and recovery is expensive
In 2023 — the most recent year covered by Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime — about 1 in 6 (16%) Canadian businesses were impacted by a cyber-security incident. That rate has actually eased since 2019 (21%) and 2021 (18%), but the cost of cleaning up has not:
- Canadian businesses spent $1.2 billion recovering from cyber-security incidents in 2023 — roughly double the 2021 figure.
- Among affected businesses, scams and fraud (50%) were the most common incident by a wide margin, followed by identity theft (31%), up 11 points from 2021.
- Large businesses (250+ employees) reported incidents at nearly twice the national rate (30%).
That last point is easy to misread. Larger organizations don’t report more incidents because they’re careless — they report more because they have the tooling and staff to detect them. The Cyber Centre’s National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025–2026 makes the flip side plain: organizations “with minimal capabilities to invest in IT infrastructure or cyber-security training” are precisely the ones that struggle to spot and respond to sophisticated attacks. For a small Canadian business, the risk isn’t that you’re targeted less — it’s that an intrusion is more likely to go unseen.
Ransomware is the throughline
Ransomware is the number the whole conversation orbits, and it’s rising. CIRA’s 2025 Cybersecurity Survey found:
- 24% of Canadian organizations suffered a successful ransomware attack in the previous 12 months.
- Of those victims, 74% paid the ransom — typically $25,000 or more.
- 74% also had data exfiltrated, not just encrypted — the shift toward “steal-and-extort” the Cyber Centre flags as a defining trend for 2025–2027.
CIRA’s 2024 survey put the attack rate at 28%, up from just 17% in 2021 — and found reputational damage reported by 28% of victims, versus 6% in 2018. The Cyber Centre now names ransomware the top cybercrime threat to Canada’s critical infrastructure.
MUSH is the sharp end
If SMBs are under-resourced, the MUSH sector — municipalities, universities, schools, and hospitals — is under-resourced and sitting on data attackers want. CIRA’s numbers on the sector are stark:
- 22% of MUSH organizations reported a successful ransomware attack.
- 84% hold the personal information of patients, students, clients, and residents.
- 41% had to activate an incident-response plan in the past 12 months — well above the private (29%) and public (37%) sectors.
These are the organizations that can least afford downtime and can least afford to pay — which is exactly why they get hit. (We go deeper on this in our work on cybersecurity for Canadian municipalities.)
The readiness gap is a remediation gap
Here’s the pattern that matters most for a lean Canadian team. The Cyber Centre lists the routes attackers actually use to get in: unpatched software, compromised credentials, phishing, and exposed remote access (RDP). Look closely and they share a trait — they’re known, fixable gaps, not exotic zero-days.
That’s the readiness gap in a sentence: finding the weakness is the easy part; closing it is the work that stalls. Most programs — and most providers — are strong at detection and weak at follow-through, which is why our vulnerability management and remediation is built to own the fix through to a verified close, not hand you a list. And because ransomware crews increasingly steal data before encrypting it, detection has to come with a human response: that’s the practical difference between a tool, a monitoring contract, and a managed outcome, which we break down in MDR vs SIEM vs MSSP.
Where does your organization stand?
Statistics describe the field; they don’t tell you your own exposure. These free, no-email self-checks turn the themes above into a score for your environment in about two minutes each:
- Cyber-insurance readiness check — the controls Canadian insurers weigh most.
- PIPEDA breach readiness check — how ready you are to detect, contain, and report a breach.
- CPCSC Level 1 readiness check — for defence-supply-chain organizations.
- Quebec Law 25 readiness check — if you hold the personal information of anyone in Quebec.
- The Canadian small-business cybersecurity checklist — 23 practical controls that stop most attacks.
Methodology & sources
This snapshot is a synthesis of published, third-party Canadian data, not a proprietary survey — every figure links to its original source below, with the survey year noted. Definitions vary between sources (Statistics Canada defines small businesses as 10–49 employees; CIRA surveys cyber-security professionals across organization sizes), so treat these as directional sector indicators rather than a single like-for-like series. We refresh this page as new editions are released, and intend to add aggregated, anonymized findings from our own readiness tools in a future edition once the sample is large enough to report responsibly.
Sources:
- Statistics Canada — Impact of cybercrime on Canadian businesses, 2023 (Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime).
- CIRA — 2025 Cybersecurity Survey and 2024 Cybersecurity Survey.
- CIRA — Why are municipalities, schools, hospitals and universities still cybercriminals’ biggest targets? (2023 survey, MUSH sector).
- Canadian Centre for Cyber Security — National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025–2026.
Working through what these numbers mean for your organization? Book a free assessment — we’ll show you what’s actually exposed today, and what it takes to close it.