"An Email Attack Can End up Costing You Over $1 million"

Security researchers at Barracuda Networks have discovered that 75% of the organizations had fallen victim to at least one successful email attack in the last 12 months, with those affected facing average potential costs of more than $1 million.  Almost a quarter (23%) of businesses stated that the cost of email attacks has risen dramatically over the last year.  The researchers noted that the fallout from an email security attack can be significant.  The most widely reported effects of those who were hit with a successful email attack were downtime and business disruption (44%), the loss of sensitive, confidential, and business-critical data (43%), and damage to brand reputation (41%).  The researchers stated that there were notable differences between industries.  For example, financial services organizations were particularly affected by the loss of valuable data and money to attackers (cited by 59% and 51% of victims, respectively), while in manufacturing, the top impact was the disruption of business operations (53%).  For healthcare institutions, the recovery costs involved in getting systems up and running again quickly were the most significant (44%).  The researchers noted that regardless of size or industry, however, organizations with more than half their employees working remotely faced higher levels of risk and recovery costs.  Of organizations surveyed, the researchers found that they feel underprepared to deal with the threat of malware and viruses (34%), advanced email attacks like account takeover (30%), business email compromise (28%), and spam (28%).  During the study, researchers questioned IT professionals from the frontline to the most senior roles in companies with 100 to 2,500 employees across various industries in the U.S., EMEA, and APAC countries.
 

Help Net Security reports: "An Email Attack Can End up Costing You Over $1 million"