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What is the Average Cost to Recover from a Cyberattack?

Josh Moore
01/19/2022
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Being the victim of a cybercrime is a terrible feeling. Your business, your privacy and your livelihood are exposed and endangered. Unfortunately, the exposure doesn’t end when a breach is discovered and patched. In fact, the cost to recover from a cyberattack is rising in both cost and complexity.

The financial impacts of a cyberattack have drastically increased, and news reports have shown that demanded ransoms and payouts are also on the rise. According to IDG’s Security Priorities Study, 87% of security leaders believe their organization is falling short in addressing cyber risk.

Unfortunately, that is not just perception. According to the same report, 59% of organizations breached in a year and the average cost of a data breach in the US is now $8.6 million.

INSURANCE TO THE RESCUE?

Many organizations have turned to cyber insurance to address the issue. Unfortunately, there is has been a reduction in overall benefits. Insurance giant Aon PLC says policyholders can expect a 20% to 50% rate increases throughout 2021. Some carriers have even started sub-limiting cyber extortion and ransomware claims. In other words, policyholders will only be able to claim a fixed amount for legal fees, research, forensics and other remedial costs from a hack attack.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

According to the State of Ransomware 2021 survey, many attackers have moved from larger scale, automated attacks to more targeted attacks, which has the potential for increasing damages. So, how should you address this growing threat?

  1. Set up your incident response plan. Many businesses that get attacked by ransomware learn too late that preparing this in advance could have saved them a lot of money, pain and downtime.

  2. No one solution is perfect but having a cybersecurity defense can vastly reduce the risk. This includes defenses such as endpoint protection, firewalls and identity security. 

  3. Back up your data. This is especially important with ransomware, as even paying the ransom is no guarantee you’ll get your data back.

  4. Don’t pay the ransom. Paying your attacker just isn’t an effective way of getting back your data, which is why you’d pay the ransom in the first place.

WHO CAN HELP?

For small to medium-sized businesses, a cybersecurity partner will likely be necessary to manage these demands. A dedicated support team should be a partner you know and trust so that if you call up for support, the service professionals are already up to speed with your security profile.

In particular, you will need a partner with Security Operation Center (SOC) capabilities. A SOC is a centralized organization employing people and technology to continuously monitor and improve an organization's security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing and responding to cybersecurity incidents.

Why is this important? According to IDG, an average cyberattacker will remain, or dwell, inside a victim’s network for 206 days. However, our SOC partner Arctic Wolf spots cyberattacks in 30 minutes or less and many of these threats were detected after 8PM and before 8AM. That level of additional support and remediation ensures that any gaps in your cybersecurity defense plan is backed up by cybersecurity professionals that are up to speed on the most current and damaging cyberthreats.

Elevity and Arctic Wolf are part of a technology management solution offering strategy, security and solutions to give organizations peace of mind. To learn more, reach out to our team of technology and security experts and see if engaging a managed technology and help desk service is right for your business.

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