Cybercrime now costs the global economy about a trillion dollars, according to a new McAfee report. The report is titled “The Hidden Cost of Cybercrime,” and in 2018, it said that the cost was an estimated $600 billion. Since then, the new figures show that the costs have risen by 50%.
In addition to that, many of the effects of cybercrime remain unseen, even though they are significant.
Losing money and intellectual property are the two biggest threats and cause the most damage during an attack. McAfee argues that the company’s performance suffers during these attacks and that the fallout from this is what most people overlook when evaluating the cost of a breach.
Some portions are overlooked
System downtime is an excellent example of a common occurrence when a business is affected by an attack. The average cost that organizations incurred when they were attacked and suffered downtime in 2019 was around $762,231.
Around 35% of the survey respondents say that IT security incidents resulting in downtime cost them $100,000 to $500,000.
Reduction in efficiency is another crucial factor, according to the report. It claims that businesses lose up to 9 hours every week caused by these disruptions. The average interruption to operations is said to be about 18 hours or so.
The costs tend to add up
There are more costs, especially when responding to and reporting an incident. Regulations state that companies have to respond and report every incident, which is neither easy nor cheap. Businesses are usually forced to work with outside consultancies to make sure that damage is minimal.
They also have to hire new employees and invest in new measures to ensure that something like that does not happen again.
All of these things tend to add up. Steve Grobman, the SVP and CTO at the company, says that there is a need for effective plans to respond to and prevent attacks to mitigate the hundreds of billions of dollars in financial impact.
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