The trust customers, partners and the public place in the organisation. Unlike Intellectual property: licenses, patents, trademarks, copyrights etc., which protects the legal ownership of a brand's name or logo, this category is about the intangible trust itself — which is damaged by incidents regardless of whether any law was broken.

Reputational damage is often the largest real-world impact of a security incident, especially for customer-facing SMEs, even when the direct financial or data loss is comparatively small.