As more and more businesses move towards the Internet (/Cloud), the risk involved in business increases. If you doubt that, then just look at the recent news of popular websites being hacked. The rise of commerce and business on the Internet also means that cybercrime becomes an increasingly interesting field for malicious person’s to take advantage of any security vulnerabilities that businesses may have.
This is not to say that businesses are not already doing a lot to protect themselves and their customers by spending huge amounts of money, but the threats just don’t seem to have decreased and the cost incurred by companies due to cybercrime just keeps on rising.
A recent study commissioned by HP reveals some interesting findings from the Cost of Cybercrime Study.
- The median annualized cost of cybercrime incurred by a benchmark sample of organizations was $5.9 million per year, with a range of $1.5 million to $36.5 million each year per organization. This represents an increase of 56 percent from the median cost for the previous year.
- Recovery and detection are the most costly internal activities, highlighting a significant cost-reduction opportunity for organizations that are able to automate detection and recovery through enabling security technologies.
- Instances of cybercrime have continued to increase in both frequency and sophistication, with the potential impact to an organization’s financial health becoming more substantial.
- Over a four-week period, the organizations surveyed experienced 72 successful attacks per week, an increase of nearly 45 percent from last year.
- More than 90 percent of all cybercrime costs were caused by malicious code, denial of service, stolen devices and web-based attacks.
- The average time to resolve a cyberattack is 18 days, with an average cost to participating organizations of nearly $416,000. This represents a nearly 70 percent increase from the estimated cost of $250,000 over a 14-day resolution period from last year.
- Malicious insider attacks can take more than 45 days to contain
- Organizations that had deployed security information and event management (SIEM) solutions realized a cost savings of nearly 25 percent, resulting from the enhanced ability to quickly detect and contain cybercrimes.
A huge oppportunity for ethical hackers? What’s your opinion?
