Digital Threats to the Economic Security of Small Businesses in Uzbekistan

Small businesses produced 53.5% of Uzbekistan's GDP in 2024, and most of them receive and pay money through bank cards and mobile applications. This article is a narrative review of the digital threats to the economic security of small businesses in Uzbekistan and a conceptual model for assessing them. Using published statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Central Bank and the National Statistics Committee for 2019-2026, it shows that the number of registered cybercrimes grew from 863 in 2019 to 58,800 in 2024, that 97.7% of the 2024 cases were unauthorised withdrawals from bank cards, and that the two largest attack categories (malicious links or applications, and SMS codes obtained by deception) rely on persuading the victim. These statistics describe citizens and firms together, and the sources reviewed include no survey of small firms, so the article does not estimate the probability or cost of an attack on a firm. Instead it proposes an expected-loss framework with explicitly hypothetical scenario values, and discusses which organisational and technical controls deserve priority. Recommendations are given for firms, banks and the state, and a design for a future empirical study is outlined. Author: Aydos Sankibayev, Tashkent State University of Economics, group I-54/24i, subject Economic Security. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aydos-sankibaev/