Average cost of cyber crime is now $13 million

The digital landscape is changing quickly, and cyber crime is on the rise. Last year there were 2.3 billion data breaches, compared to 826 million in 2017. With attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated and hard to defend against, they can cost organisations a lot of money each year.

According to a new Accenture report, the average cost of cybercrime grew by more than $1 million in 2018 to $13 million per organization.

The report found that last year 85% of organisations experienced phishing and social engineering attacks and 76% suffered web-based attacks.

Malware and web-based attacks were the most expensive at $2.6 million and $2.3 million respectively. According to Accenture, these two types of cyber attack “represented a third of all cybercrime costs globally last year”. However, the biggest jump in costs came from malicious insiders: last year, insider attacks cost each organization $1.6 million on average, a 15% increase in 2017.

Similarly, the latest Verizon Insider Threat Report revealed that “20% of cybersecurity incidents and 15% of the data breaches investigated in its Data Breach Investigations Report last year were related to insiders”. The cyber criminals’ main motivation was financial gain (48%).

How GRC eLearning can help

Cyber attacks can be immensely damaging to an organisation, so it’s important that staff are aware of the threats and know what do to when disaster strikes.

IT Governance’s sister company, GRC eLearning, offers cost-effective, flexible and efficient staff awareness training to help your organization mitigate the threat of a cyber attack. Their Information Security Staff Awareness E-learning Course provides an overview of information security weaknesses that criminals often exploit, and allows your employees to apply the knowledge gained, using practical activities throughout the course and an assessment to measure understanding.

Find out more >>