If you don’t believe that a high level of cybersecurity is essential to your business, you’ve got another thing coming. Cybersecurity has become a huge area of concern for many businesses and sub-par levels of security can prove to be extremely harmful to your organization.
In fact, the World Economic Forum placed cybersecurity as one of the top 10 threats in 140 economies, and ranked it above other notable threats such as food shortages, interstate conflict, terrorism, and infectious diseases. In addition to this, the ISACA and RSA conducted a recent survey and found that 82% of boards questioned were either moderately concerned or very concerned about cybersecurity. All of this combined has caused many CEOs to ask management about their ability to not only prevent an attack, but also take the necessary steps in the event of a cyberattack.
The average total cost of a data breach in 2016 was
$7.01 million dollars
Unfortunately, the large majority of companies don’t recognize how much a data breach may hurt them until after the fact. According to the 2016 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States, conducted by IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average cost per lost or stolen record was $221. While this may seem like a small fee per record, most breaches go unidentified for an extended period of time, resulting in thousands of records being lost or stolen. The average total cost of a data breach in 2016 was $7.01 million dollars, and the average time to identify a breach was 191 days.
Other interesting trends that the study found included the substantial increase in cost for a company as more records were stolen, and a greater churn (or loss of existing customers) and greater cost on average to recover the data. For companies who lost less than 10,000 records in a data breach, an average of $4.9 million was spent to resolve the data. On the contrary, companies who lost more than 50,000 records spent an average of $13.1 million to recover data. Companies who also lost more than 4% of existing customers had to spend an average of $12.1 million compared to the $5.4 million spent by companies who lost less than 1% of their existing customers.
With all this taken into account, cybersecurity is a critical issue that must be addressed in any business organization and monitored on a day-to-day basis. Hackers are very sneaky and can often damage your business right under your nose, which is why it is crucial to have the correct preemptive measures in place to help ensure the security of property and assets that pertain to your organization. Stay tuned for future blog posts on the different types of cyberattacks, and be sure to check out your local Security 101 website for upcoming events on cybersecurity.
Current events are occurring in:
Security 101 - Hampton Roads (VA) - July 19th
Security 101 - Washington D.C. - July 20th