The cost of a cyber attack

With the risk of a cyber attack now being classed as the top threat to organisations, it’s vital to have the right cyber security measures in place to protect your organisation from an attack. It’s not just an organisation’s reputation that can be damaged by a data breach – the financial costs can often have a more severe effect.

Lloyd’s of London has estimated the global cost of a serious cyber attack to be more than $120 billion (£92 billion). It believes the most likely scenario to lead to this sort of cost is a criminal hacker targeting a Cloud service provider, taking it down in the process.

PwC’s Global State of Information Security Survey 2018 found that “the average total financial cost of incidents [was] £857,000”. However, this figure is based on only 14% of respondents that reported their direct financial losses.

Ponemon’s 2017 Cost of Cyber Crime Study revealed alarming figures with regard to the costs of a cyber attack and how much these have risen. Over the last five years, the average cost has risen by 62% and in the past year alone, this figure was 27.4%.

One of the main factors behind the rise in the cost of a cyber attack is the number of days it can take to resolve it – the longer it takes, the more expensive it gets.

On average, the cost for the UK and the number of days it takes to resolve a cyber attack per type are as follows:

Malware: £1.57 million – 6.4 days

Web-based attacks: £1.52 million – 22.4 days

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks: £1.31 million – 16.8 days

Malicious insiders: £960,000 – 50 days

Malicious code: £960,000 – 55.2 days

Phishing and social engineering: £960,000 – 20 days

Stolen devices: £700,000 – 14.6 days

Ransomware: £520,000 – 23.1 days

Botnets: £260,000 – 2.5 days

The severity and cost of a cyber attack is increasing with detrimental effects on organisations. It’s crucial that an organisation has strong cyber security defences in place to ensure its protection.

Cyber Incident Response Management

Cyber Incident response management can help reduce the risk of a cyber attack. An incident response framework will enable your organisation to identify breaches, prevent unauthorised access to data stores, prevent malware infection, remediate threats, and control your risk and exposure during an attack.

With an incident response planning strategy from IT Governance, you will gain access to an experienced, dedicated technical group of people that can carry out sophisticated cyber security incident investigations quickly and effectively, helping you to identify, detect and contain incidents faster.