5 Ways Cyber Attacks Can Damage Your Business

Featured article by Catherine Ryan, Cybersecurity Expert

Businesses, both large and small, are constantly faced with the risk of cyber attacks. For businesses that become victims of cybercrimes, the cost is extremely high. In 2017 alone, economies across the globe lost over USD$600 billion to cyber attacks. This growing threat has forced businesses to regularly evaluate their cyber security frameworks.

They do this by assessing their risk levels regularly, developing incident response plans, and identifying vulnerabilities in their business systems. If you’re not sure how damaging a security breach can be, here are five ways a cyber attack can damage your business:

1. Additional Expenses

If a serious cyber security breach occurs, the recovery process tends to involve recreating or restoring electronic data. This time-consuming process requires the staff in the business to spend time on the process. Besides man hours, businesses are forced to incur additional expenses to keep operations running. For example, if a cyber attack causes damage to computers, businesses have to replace the damaged computers with new ones in order to sustain operations. This is extremely costly for businesses.

2. Loss Of Data

If a cyber attack occurs in your business, it can result in the damage or even loss of electronic data stored in devices, such as computers. A good example of a cyber attack is a virus infection that affects your records and renders them useless. The loss of electronic data is extremely costly for a business. To lower the risk of losing your business data, consider using tools such as Red Team Secure to identify threats in your systems and applications.

3. Privacy And Security Lawsuits

Cyber criminals target computer systems. Besides damaging them, they also steal data that belong to other parties, like customer data. For instance, hackers may steal data from upcoming mergers that touch on customers. This predisposes the merger to failure When this happens, businesses may find themselves in court dealings with lawsuits as customers sue for breach of data privacy and failing to protect their data. They can easily allege negligence on the part of the company, resulting in financial losses. These losses can weigh the business down and injure its reputation.

4. Income Loss

Cyber attacks can easily lead to loss of income for businesses that experience them. This happens when the flow of operations is interrupted for days due to cyber security breaches. For most businesses, this downtime means loss of income. For instance, if a business runs an online store and the e-commerce site is affected, customers are unable to place orders. This means the business loses income for the days that the website remains closed until the damage resulting from the cyber attack is fixed.

5. Extortion

Cyber criminals are well-known for extorting money from their victims. This mostly happens when they steal highly sensitive data about a company and threaten to post them online if the business doesn’t pay a specified ransom amount. In some instances, businesses download ransomware that encrypt their data and render them unusable either accidentally or without their knowledge. The perpetrators then demand that a ransom payment be paid before they can send an electronic key to unlock the encrypted files. This causes damage to the business by forcing them to spend money on stuff that they’d not planned.

Final Thoughts

Cyber attacks have become rampant globally, and businesses continue to pay a huge price when they occur. In addition to the five damages discussed above, cybercrime also damages the reputation of a business seriously. In most instances, customers become wary of doing business with businesses that experience cyber attacks as they view them as careless and having weak security controls.

Catherine Ryan

Catherine Ryan is a cybersecurity expert with a web design and development background. Her expertise led her to various company roles and inspired her to help people and companies uphold cybersecurity through her training services and her guest posts and blogs.
Catherine is happily married and a mother of two girls. She enjoys baking, cooking, gardening, and DIY crafts. Also, she has a passion for singing and loves yoga.