05 February 2019

The average cost of a cyber attack has climbed to $1.1m (around £855,000), according to Radware. For those organisations that calculate rather than estimate the cost of an attack, that number increases to $1.7m (around £1.3m).

For its 2018-2019 Global Applicationand Network Security Report, the cyber security and application delivery solutions specialist leveraged vendor-neutral survey data from 790 IT executives spanning several industries around the globe. It also utilised its own hands-on experience of handling today’s leading threats as well as third-party service provider commentary.

Radware discovered that while the cost of attack mitigation continues to rise, so does the number of organisations under attack. It says most have experienced some type of attack within the course of a year, with only seven per cent of respondents claiming not to have experienced an attack at all. Twenty one per cent reported daily attacks, representing a rise from 13 per cent last year.

The firm adds that not only are attacks becoming more frequent, they are also more effective: 78 per cent of those hit by a cyber attack experienced service degradation or a complete outage, compared to 68 per cent last year.

According to the study, the top impact of cyber attacks is operational/productivity loss (54 per cent) followed by negative customer experience (43 per cent). Forty-five per cent reported that the goal of the attacks they suffered was service disruption, while 35 per cent said the aim was data theft.

Jeff Curley, head of online and digital for Radware UK, Ireland and the Nordics, says: “This year, we’ve seen a real shift in the impact an attack has on a company financially and it’s especially interesting that more companies are taking the time to calculate the loss, not just estimate it. That’s not surprising given how volatile economies are at the moment.

“Understanding the impact of downtime on productivity as well as sales and consumer trust is essential to justify spending money on protecting the business in the future, and staying competitive.”