The world is rightly obsessed with the COVID-19 pandemic right now, but there's also a growing cybercrime pandemic. The good news is that fewer firms are reporting breaches. The bad news is that for those who are victimized, the attacks are more severe — and more expensive.
According Hiscox, a Bermuda-based insurance provider, cyber losses rose nearly sixfold worldwide over the past 12 months. Its recently released "Cyber Readiness Report 2020" pins the total cyber losses among affected firms at $1.8 billion — up a sobering 50% from the previous year's total of $1.2 billion. Overall, more than 6% of the respondents in the report paid a ransom, and their collective losses totaled $381 million.
Interestingly enough, Hiscox says that companies are 15 times more likely to experience a cyberattack (30% in UK) than a fire or theft (2% in UK).
Who Was Most at Risk?Not surprisingly, larger organizations were the most common targets — and shelled out the most money — for cybercriminals. The financial impact differed widely across countries, verticals, and firm sizes. According to Hiscox, the energy, manufacturing, and financial services sectors are especially at risk. This is the result of low maturity in cyber resilience and low tolerance to what is often a high-impact outage.
Irish and German companies reported the biggest median losses, but the pain was widely shared. Among the attacked organizations, the median losses for energy firms increased over 30-fold, while a number of other sectors faced losses many times greater than the previous year. The biggest recorded loss for a single organization was $87.9 million (for a UK f ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
