Impact of cyber attack on your business
Understand the impact of cyber attacks on businesses and their finances, reputation and consumer confidence.
A successful cyber attack can cause major damage to your business. It can affect your bottom line, as well as your business' standing and consumer trust. The impact of a security breach can be broadly divided into three categories: financial, reputational and legal.
Economic cost of cyber attack
Cyber attacks often result in a substantial financial loss arising from:
- theft of corporate information
- theft of financial information (eg bank details or payment card details)
- theft of money
- disruption to trading (eg inability to carry out transactions online)
- loss of business or contract
In dealing with the breach, businesses will also generally incur costs associated with repairing affected systems, networks and devices.
The found that 43% of businesses and 30% of charities experienced a cyber breach or attack in the past 12 months. This is much higher for medium businesses (67%), large businesses (74%), and high-income charities with 拢500,000 or more in annual income (64%).
Based on what respondents believed and self-reported, the government estimated that the average cost of the most disruptive breach for each business in the last 12 months was 拢1,600 for businesses and 拢3,240 for charities. Excluding those who reported 拢0 costs, the average cost of the most disruptive breach rises to 拢3,550 for businesses and 拢8,690 for charities.
Reputational damage
Trust is an essential element of a customer relationship. Cyber attacks can damage your business' reputation and erode the trust your customers have for you. This, in turn, could potentially lead to:
- loss of customers
- loss of sales
- reduction in profits
The effect of reputational damage can even impact on your suppliers, or affect relationships you may have with partners, investors and other third parties vested in your business.
Legal consequences of a cyber breach
Data protection and privacy laws require you to manage the security of all personal data you hold - whether on your staff or your customers. If this data is accidentally or deliberately compromised, and you have failed to deploy appropriate security measures, you may face fines and regulatory sanctions.
How to minimise the impact of cyber attacks on businesses
Security breaches can devastate even the most resilient of businesses. It is extremely important to manage the risks accordingly.
You can use the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) free to perform a range of simple online checks to identify common vulnerabilities in your public-facing IT.
The NCSC also offer a free . By answering a few simple questions, you can get a free personalised action plan that lists what you or your organisation can do right now to protect against cyber attack.
After an attack happens, an effective cyber security incident response plan can help you:
- reduce the impact of the attack
- report the incident to the relevant authority - see how to report a cyber crime
- clean up the affected systems
- get your business up and running in the shortest time possible
It can help to invest in user training, education and awareness in your organisation on an ongoing basis.