According to research from Webroot, 78 percent of IT decision-makers at mid-sized businesses (100-499 employees) believe that cyber attacks will cost they’re company less than $1 million. To make matters worse, 62 percent believe that it will cost less than $500,000 and 22 percent believe it will cost less than $100,000. So how wrong are they? A lot.
While the math isn’t exact and numbers vary across the board, the consensus is pretty clear: it costs a lot more than these people think. According to one study from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the average annual losses per US company that experiences a cyber attack is $15.4 million in 2016. Another study from IBM estimated the cost at around $3.62 million in 2017. While this data is far from consistent, one thing is clear: it costs a whole lot more than $500,000. The survey, conducted by Wakefield Research, is pretty damning when it comes to the educational level of IT decision makers. It also showed that most of them are very confident (87 percent) in their knowledge of the effects of cyber attacks, despite their lack of knowledge in regards to how much it might costs. And if you ask me, that’d be the first thing an IT decision-maker would be concerned about when it came to cybersecurity.
