Average Cost of a Cyberattack Now Exceeds $1 Million, Research Shows

The cost of attack mitigation is ascending, and so it the number of organizations under attack. Between 2018 and 2019, most organizations have experienced some type of attack, and only 7% have experienced no attack at all, according to new research.

The Global Application and Network Security Report by Radware reveals that IT executives across all verticals are beginning to feel the pressure to set up a robust cybersecurity emergency response plan. Survey respondents estimate the average cost of a cyberattack at $1.1 million. For those organizations that actually calculate (versus estimate) the cost of an attack, that number climbs to $1.67 million.

Some 54% of organizations that suffered one or more breaches cited impact operational/productivity loss as a top impact, followed by negative customer experience, 43%. Almost half of respondents reported that the goal of the attacks was service disruption, and 35% said the goal was data theft.

Most organizations have experienced some type of attack within the course of a year, with only 7% of respondents claiming to have experienced no attack at all. 21% reported daily attacks, up from 13% last year. 78% of respondents hit by a cyberattack suffered service degradation or a complete outage, compared to 68% last year, indicating that attacks are not only becoming more frequent, but that hackers are also getting better at their job.

Other findings include:

• 35% of businesses named data leakage and information loss as the biggest concerns in the event of a breach, followed by service outages
• HTTPS floods grew from 28% to 34%, reports of DNS climbed from 33% to 38%, reports of burst attacks grew from 42% to 49%, and reports of bot attacks increased from 69% to 76%; these findings indicate that hackers increasingly rely on fresh attack vectors to bring down networks and data centers
• 34% see application vulnerabilities (application layer attacks) as a major concern in the coming year

Despite these results, 34% of respondents said they have no cybersecurity emergency response plan – a worrying find in today’s tightly regulated digital and economic landscape. On the good side, the vast majority of those surveyed said they have explored machine-learning and artificial intelligence solutions to counter cyber-threats, with almost half of those surveyed trusting these solutions to improve response times and security.