In 2021, the cost of a cyber attack on UK businesses was £3.8 million with a staggering 23% of victims reporting having lost anywhere between £10,000 and £49,000. But how can a cyber attack cost so much?
How is money lost in a cyber attack?
You might think a cyber attack will only cost your business money if they manage to gain your finance credentials. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Last year, the average ‘cash’ cost of a cyber attack was around £4000. These physical cash losses may have been through ransomware or social engineering scams resulting in mandate fraud or unauthorised bank access. But cash payments to cyber criminals are just the beginning.
It is estimated that 39% of the cost of a cyber attack comes at least a year after the event.
The hidden cost of a cyber attack
Lost man hours
It’s not unusual for a cyber attack to grind your business to a halt. A ransomware attack alone can put a business down for 15 to 22 days.
During this downtime, not only is your business not making its usual day-to-day profit, but you are paying staff who are unable to work and potentially losing business to competitors.
How to calculate the cost of downtime for your business.
Data loss
Losing data as a result of a cyber attack isn’t just an inconvenience, it costs money in charges and time to reinput all lost information, documents and files.
To give you an idea of how this would financially impact your business, the average cost per record compromised is around £115. Consider the number of records and complexity of the data your business holds, and you can get a good idea of how much a data breach could cost your business.
Learn about the benefits of cloud backups.
Putting things right
This heavily depends on your IT support. If you rely solely on an in-house team or IT manager, your downtime will be increased. This could be due to lack of experience or simply lack of capacity as daily IT management will need to be maintained.
If you don’t have an IT support contract and call in an outsourced support provider to assist with the crisis ad hoc, you could be left waiting and be stung with a huge bill.
Reputational damage
This cost of a cyber attack is immeasurable and often irreversible. If your business experiences a data breach that poses a risk to your clients or customers, you are required by GDPR legislation to inform them. Even if a cyber attack doesn’t affect their data, the chances of at least some of them getting wind of the event is pretty high as your services are likely to be impacted in one way or another.
As a result, you’re likely to lose business and find it hard to win new business as your cyber security is brought into question.
ICO fines
It’s easy for an innocent oversight to lead to a hefty fine. If a hacker gets so much as a glimpse of your customer email database due to non-compliance, you could be looking at a fine of at least 2% of your annual global turnover. However, if you fall victim to a data breach but can prove the data was properly protected, you can drive down GDPR sanctions and other fines significantly.
How to reduce the cost of a cyber attack
Artificial Intelligence – AI and automated tools can help to detect suspicious behaviour and turn a cyber attack into an attempt.
An effective IT Plan – have a robust IT Plan and Response Strategy to ensure your business is back on its feet as quickly as possible in the event of an attack.
Managed Service Providers – working with an MSP will give you peace of mind that your cyber security is being monitored and managed and if the worst should happen, you have a team of experts ready to put out the fire.
Be confident in your cyber security
At Jupiter IT, we understand better than most that every business is different. That’s why we offer solutions that are tailored to your budget. If the most obvious solution is out of your reach, we will work to find a way to get your business the protection it needs at a price you can afford.
And our cyber security services don’t stop there. We provide our clients with tailored cyber security training for all of their staff as well as support and consultancy that’s just a phone call away.
