Cost of cyber crime on the increase for UK SMEs
More UK organisations than before are being forced to face up to the costs of cybercrime according to a study.
The Ponemon Institute has said the costs of such crime are rising massively and it is the smallest companies who are being hit hardest.
The study looked at 36 UK-based institutions and many more from across the world.
Of the UK companies, there were 192 reported attacks with an average annual cost of £2.99 million.
This ranged from £379,000 at the lower end of the scale to £17 million at the other, while the average figure represents a 36 per cent rise on 2012.
A year ago the average cost of cybercrime recovery was £2.1 million per affected organisation.
Of the items that proved costly to deal with, malicious insiders, web-based attacks, denial of service and malicious unidentified malware were among the worst.
Many of these can often go undetected for a long period of time and costs of repair rise accordingly if they are left for long periods.
Rapid cleanup and discovery costs less, although the average time taken to resolve an attack took 25 days according to the report.
The finance, defense and energy sectors were shown to spend more on putting issues right, although cyber crime affected almost every sector of business.
Smaller businesses are feeling the effects of such attacks most as the necessary funds take a larger proportion of the budget.
Ponemon’s study also looked at France, Germany, Japan, Australia and the US and showed that the cost of cyber crime is increasing on a global scale.
More attacks are being detected while there is also believed to be a greater level of awareness when it comes to such attacks.
For example, those companies with security measures in place experienced lower costs as the issues were able to be dealt with quickly.
Tackling cybercrime is an issue for companies of any size, but it appears that SMEs need to be extra careful to ensure that such attacks do not completely destroy their businesses.
By Phil Smith