A study pegged by the found cybercrime costs have gone up significantly relative to last year. According to the report, the average US company loses $1.9 million to cyberattacks each year, up from $1.5 million reported last year. The bigger the company, the higher the costs. The same study found the average large US company loses $15.4 million, which is 19 percent higher from $12.7 million a year ago.
Criminals are stepping up their game and data breaches are becoming both common and devastating. In 2013, there were more than 100 DDOS attacks at over 100Gbps or higher , while events topping 20Gbps in the first half of 2014 nearly doubled those for the entire year of 2013. Yes, companies have also grown more sophisticated, but so far cyberattackers seem to be leading the arm’s race.
Some of the most famous recent hacks include Ebay (hackers had managed to steal personal records of 233 million users) , P.F. Chang (the company’s customer payment information records were breached, so thousands and thousands of credit cards surfaced on the black market) or Domino’s Pizza (Hacking group Rex Mundi held Domino’s Pizza to ransom over 600,000 Belgian and French customer records). All in all, today company lose 82 percent more money to cyber crime than they had six years ago, according to Ponemon.
“As an industry we’re getting better, but attacks are becoming much more invasive and sophisticated,” said Andrzej Kawalec, chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard Co.’s HP Enterprise Security, which sponsored the study and sells cybersecurity services to businesses.
To assess costs, the Ponemon researchers factored in costs or damages incurred from detection, recovery, investigation and incident-response management. Expenses meant to cover loss of additional business due to security breaches were also included.
This was a global study that spanned 252 companies in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan, Russia and Brazil. Globally, the average annualized cost of cybercrime increased 1.9 percent from last year to $7.7 million.
