The cost of dealing with cybercrime has increased more than 50% compared to last year, a sign of why enterprises of all sizes need to reconsider their approach to protecting corporate assets and intelligence.

In a study that was funded by Hewlett-Packard, the Ponemon Institute found that the annual median cost of cybercrime from 50 benchmark corporations across various industries was $5.9 million per year, with a range of $1.5 million to $36.5 million per year. Compared to last year, the median cost has increased by 56 percent, which had a median cost of $3.8 million with a range of $1 million to $53 million per year.

During the four-week period of the survey, organizations experienced 72 successful attacks per week, which represents a 45 percent increase from last year. Most of the attacks were caused by malicious code, denial of service, stolen devices and web-based attacks.

“Instances of cybercrime have continued to increase in both frequency and sophistication, with the potential impact to an organization’s financial health becoming more substantial,” said Tom Reilly, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Security, HP.

“Organizations in the most targeted industries are reducing the impact by leveraging security and risk management technologies, which is grounds for optimism in what continues to be a fierce fight against cybercrime.”

The study also found that cyber attacks can become more costly if not immediately resolved. On the average, it would take about 18 days to resolve an attack consequentially, costing an average of $416,000. Whereas, a 14-day resolution would cost $250,000 from last year’s study.

Major bulk of the cost of cybercrime comes from recovery and detection. A key finding of the study suggest that deploying advance security like automated detection and recovery offers significant cost-reduction for organizations. Savings of about 25 percent have been realized from organizations that deployed security information and event management (SIEM) to quickly detect and contain cyberattacks.

These days, cyber attacks are becoming more frequent and taking sights on large organizations.

For example, Operation Cyber Rat was revealed yesterday. It is the worst online attack in history.  In all, there is evidence of 72 networks being infiltrated, including the United Nations, 14 governments and major defense contractors.

Amazon is no exception with their cloud storage services becoming a hotbed for cybercriminals. According security experts, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is vulnerable to financial data stealing malware and to a theft suite. Even though the attacks were considered isolated, it is apparent that cybercriminals have been eyeing cloud services.

Services Angle

With cybercrimes becoming more sophisticated and frequent, damages from these attacks can severely affect an organization. Recent high-profile attacks represent that cybercrime can exploit cloud-based services. But the real threat is to antiquated enterprise infrastructures that are ripe for exploitation.