How much can a cyberattack cost your organization?

The cyberattack threat is real and a serious concern for organizations worldwide. With new threats emerging all the time and hackers capitalizing on new approaches, companies are constantly exposed to cyberattack risks including products, operating systems, clouds, and networks from internal and external sources. And the business implications of cyber security breaches can be devastating and expensive. 

In today's evolving threat landscape, most companies rely on cloud-based technology, the Internet of Things (IoT), and collaboration tools to catch up with accelerated Digital Transformation and technological innovation. And many of them fail to prepare and protect themselves from the lingering consequences of hi-tech hazards and cybersecurity risk exposure. Cybercrime not only adversely disrupts business operations with unauthorized access to sensitive data, but attempts to disable critical organizational infrastructure can lead to massive downtime, reputational harm, and financial losses. 

Key impact factors on cyberattack average cost 

The average cost of cyberattack and digital crimes can cost an organization upto $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from the average data breach cost of $9.05 million. Certainly, $10.5 trillion is enough to cripple the digital transformation goals of any organization. Also, a recent report indicates that the average data breach cost in the United States amounted to USD 9.44 million, whereas the global average cost per data breach was USD 4.35 million as of 2022.

And on top of it, the company has to deal with post-attack disruption like the loss of intellectual property, customer remediation and system repair, regulatory and compliance fines, and the loss of potential business customers, followed by the additional hidden costs of a cyberattack:

• Customer breach notifications: A strategically planned breach response system is a necessity in today's times when cyber incidents are on the rise. With a pre‑planned and customer‑centric response, an organization can minimize the impact of a data breach by quickly notifying every affected customer without undue delay. A failure to adopt a planned response system means an enterprise is caught off-guard against cyber attacks and putting customers' information at risk of theft.
• Post-breach customer protection: Investing in scalable and protected infrastructure engineered for 24/7 issues and crisis response support will help businesses to navigate post-breach complexities immediately with reduced internal and external impacts. Upon post-breach activation, the specialized identity protection advisory team comes to rescue. It ensures minimal damage at the potential operational, reputational, and financial fronts without undue delay by enabling fraud alerting, dark web monitoring, identity protection, and remediation support.
• Regulatory compliance (fines): Companies who fail to set up a strong cybercrime-resilient architecture often get trapped in the vicious circle of non-compliance consequences. Poor cyber risk management means increased enforcement actions and penalties in the form of fines, enforcement notices, or an investigation from the data protection regulator.
• Public relations/crisis communications: Many companies having weak cyberattack resilient infrastructure fail to tackle a crisis against culprits like Malware, hacking, ransomware, phishing, internal threat, and DDoS (Distributed-Denial-Of-Service) attacks. As a result, they get exposed to heavy losses related to reputation, financial stock, and business continuity. IT crisis management, pre-crisis planning, and proactive cyberattack communication is more critical than ever before in today's emerging data threats and an ever-changing media landscape before incorrect information starts to propagate.
• Operational disruption: More connected enterprises are exposed to new vulnerabilities and are at risk of the enormous potential cost of downtime due to cyberattacks. Ransomware attacks and data breaches can have devastating consequences on your operational excellence and so making large investments in IT and OT asset protection is a strategic business imperative. To defend your enterprise against the severe consequences of disrupted operations, you must assess and contextualize the entire asset ecosystem,  manage third-party exposure, and make better cyber risk decisions. 
• Loss of intellectual property (IP): In today's connected digital landscape, your organization is exposed to numerous cyberattacks, including backdoor trojan, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, denial of service (DoS), distributed denial of service (DDoS), DNS tunneling, malware, phishing scams, ransomware, structured query language (SQL) injection, and zero-day exploit. All of these cyberattacks take advantage of unknown hardware and software weaknesses present in your IT infrastructure and get unauthorized access to all your personal computers, computer networks, IT infrastructure, and IT systems. 
• Devaluation of trade name: Reputational harm is the most dramatic intangible damage organizations under cyberattacks have to deal with. Devaluation of trade names involves the loss in value of the trade names, trademarks, trade secrets,  patents, designs, copyrights, or symbols. Recovery from such intangible losses is quite difficult because the devaluation of a trade name is often followed by a  loss of customer and stakeholder trust. A conceptual framework to avoid such intangible damage begins with strategically analyzing cyber risk exposures, assessing cybersecurity and data breach preparedness capabilities.

As the industry moves towards the accelerated roll-out of 5G, cloud infrastructure, and IoT services as a part of the digital transformation journey, enterprises cannot evade the above-mentioned cyberattack impacts. However, investments in cybersecurity can be a crucial step to escape the potential cybersecurity impacts and long-term business disruption. An effective cybersecurity system powered by passwordless authentication, multi-factor authentication, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) can make all the difference when businesses are attacked. 

Be vigilant towards a catastrophic cyberattack with Kellton

Adopting cybersecurity systems as a strategic priority works as a proactive resilience approach. It enables victimized organizations to strengthen their security posture by preventing, detecting, and reporting the critical loopholes in their legacy infrastructure through threat intelligence, continuous security monitoring, and early detection processes.

As the cyber threat landscape continues to expand, it is crucial for organizations to understand that time is money. A shorter data breach lifecycle means minimum disruption and lesser data breach cost. Businesses must increase their cyber budgets for resilience planning and gain a stronger hold on the cyber resilience quotient in response to the changing landscape of cybersecurity threats. 

At Kellton, we help businesses to adopt bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies underpinned by a Zero Trust Security model and strengthen their cybersecurity posture by protecting all their business-critical data and systems from potential malicious breaches.