The Costs of Cyberattacks: How One Breach Can Sink Your Business

25 September, 2024 

In today’s interconnected world, cyberattacks are more frequent and more dangerous than ever before. Businesses, regardless of size or industry, are prime targets for cybercriminals. These attacks can cause widespread damage and create long-lasting consequences. In this article, Kaspersky dives into the impact of cyberattacks on business and reveals the key losses that an unprotected business can suffer.

When we consider the impact of cyberattacks on business, the first thing we pay attention to is financial losses. An example of an incident with huge financial losses is the attack on Johnson Controls, a major player in the building technology sector, that faced a significant ransomware incident perpetrated by the Dark Angels hacking group. The attackers claimed to have stolen 27 terabytes of sensitive data and demanded a $51 million ransom. This breach resulted in severe disruptions to the company’s systems and cost over $27 million in damages.

The attack impacted Johnson Controls’ business operations, including disruptions to its billing systems and increased recovery expenses. As a company with a global presence, the breach significantly affected its business relationships and operations. 

Below, Kaspersky explores several key ways a cyberattack can hurt your business.

Financial losses

Cyberattacks often result in direct financial losses. Ransomware attacks, where hackers demand payment to restore access to data or directly steal funds, are a clear example. But this is only the beginning, as there are numerous other consequences that may result in considerable indirect financial losses. These can easily exceed what the company has lost as an immediate outcome of the incident.

Operational disruption

Cyberattacks can grind your operations to a halt. Many businesses depend on their digital infrastructure for day-to-day activities. If systems are compromised, productivity falls. In severe cases, entire operations may be disrupted for days or even weeks, resulting in lost revenue, diminished service quality and disappointed clients and partners — an additional impact on your company’s reputation. 

Indirect long-term costs

Even following the immediate aftermath of a cyberattack, businesses often face long-term financial impacts. Restoring systems, improving cybersecurity infrastructure, and managing the legal fallout are just some of the lingering costs. Additionally, lost business and damaged customer relationships can take months or years to rebuild.

Reputational damage

The trust your clients place in you is invaluable. If customer data is stolen in a breach, it can severely damage your brand’s reputation. This loss of trust can lead to customers leaving and a long-term decline in business. In some cases, a single breach is enough to ruin a company’s public image beyond repair.

If your business falls victim to an attack, it can also impact your relationships with partners and vendors. Third-party partners might lose confidence in your ability to protect shared data. Similarly, business-critical relationships could be jeopardized if you fail to recover quickly or if your systems compromise their operations.

Legal and compliance issues

With data protection regulations such as the GDPR in Europe or HIPAA in the U.S., a data breach can lead to heavy fines. Failing to protect sensitive customer or employee data may result in penalties and lawsuits. Furthermore, companies that fall victim to breaches often face lengthy legal battles, which add to the financial and reputational strain.

Loss of intellectual property

For many businesses, intellectual property (IP) is among their most valuable assets. Cyberattacks targeting IP can steal product designs, marketing strategies, and proprietary information. This is particularly harmful in competitive industries like technology and pharmaceuticals, where IP theft can erase the advantage a company has spent years building.

“Attackers are never idle – they’re like wolves who must be constantly active to catch their prey off-guard.  So, companies need to be ever more alert and agile. They must be sure they have the right solutions and processes to allow for effective threat discovery and containment, as well as swift recovery. At Kaspersky, we’re deeply committed to delivering the agile security that businesses need.  Proactive assessments and multi-layered protective solutions, plus managed security and actionable threat intelligence – we have it all. What’s more important, we have the expertise to put together the exact cybersecurity structure for your individual profile. Only a consistent and comprehensive approach, like this one, can ensure true business resilience against today’s cyber risks,” comments Oleg Gorobets, Security Evangelist at Kaspersky. 

Below, Kaspersky offers some recommendations to help your business stay ahead of cyberthreats and remain resilient: 

• To protect the company against a wide range of threats, use solutions from the Kaspersky Next product line that provide real-time protection, threat visibility, and the investigation and response capabilities of EDR and XDR for organizations of any size and industry.
• If your company doesn’t have a dedicated IT security function and only has generalist IT admins who may lack the specialist skills required for expert-level detection and response solutions, consider subscribing to a managed service such as Kaspersky MDR. This would instantly boost your security capabilities by an order of magnitude, while allowing you to focus on building in-house expertise.
• Always keep the software updated on all the devices you use to prevent attackers from infiltrating your network by exploiting vulnerabilities, while making sure your endpoints are protected with Exploit Prevention technology.
• Install patches for new vulnerabilities as soon as possible. Once they are downloaded, threat actors can no longer abuse the vulnerabilities.  The Kaspersky Next product line offers both Vulnerability & Patch, management and Exploit Prevention.
• Set up offline backups that intruders cannot tamper with. Make sure you can quickly access them in an emergency when needed.  
• For protection of very small businesses, use solutions intended to help you manage your cybersecurity even without having an IT administrator on board. Kaspersky Small Office Security provides you with hands-off security due to ‘install and forget’ protection and saves the budget which is crucial, particularly in the early stages of business development.  
• Transform the workforce into an extra layer of protection against human-related cyberattacks with the Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform, a solution that instills safe internet behavior and includes a simulated phishing attack exercise, so they know how to recognize phishing emails and other socially engineered lures. 
• Employing Kaspersky Professional Services optimizes the workload of your heavily challenged IT department. Kaspersky experts assess the state of your current IT security, then deploy and configure Kaspersky software quickly and properly to ensure hassle-free ongoing performance. And Kaspersky Premium Support facilitates quicker technical incident resolution, with minimal impact on business processes. 
• Approach your protection with utter diligence and consider additional hardening options. Use cybersecurity solutions with application, web and device controls which limit the use of unsolicited apps, websites and peripherals. This significantly reduces the risk of infection, even in cases where employees use shadow IT or make mistakes due to a lack of cybersafe habits.