Firms Spend $1197 Per Employee Yearly to Address Cyber-Attacks

Companies pay an average of $1197 per employee yearly to address successful cyber incidents against email services, cloud collaboration apps or services and browsers.

Security researchers at Perception Point shared the findings with Infosecurity before publishing them in a new white paper this month.

According to the new data, the above figures exclude compliance fines, ransomware mitigation costs and losses from non-operational processes, all of which can cause further spending.

The survey, conducted in conjunction with Osterman Research in June, considers the responses of 250 security and IT decision-makers at various enterprises and reveals additional discoveries regarding today’s enterprise threat landscape.

“These findings demonstrate the urgent need for organizations to find the most accurate and efficient cybersecurity solutions which provide the necessary protection with streamlined processes and managed services,” commented Perception Point CEO Yoram Salinger.

Among the findings is that malicious incidents against new cloud-based apps and services occur at 60% of the frequency with which they take place on email-based services.

Additionally, some attacks, like those involving malware installed on an endpoint, happen on cloud collaboration apps at a much higher rate (87%) when compared to email-based services.

The Perception Point report also shows that a successful email-based cyber incident takes security staff an average of 86 hours to address.

In light of these figures, the security company added that one security professional with no additional support can only handle 23 email incidents annually, representing a direct cost of $6452 per incident alone.

Conversely, incidents detected on cloud collaboration apps or services take, on average, 71 hours to resolve. In these cases, one professional can handle just 28 incidents yearly at an average cost of $5305 per incident.

“The rapid growth of non-email-based threats crucially underscores the need for security teams to keep up with emerging trends,” added Salinger, “especially as the modern work environment is in flux and the number of cloud-based collaboration tools that organizations rely on is only likely to expand.”

The Perception Point white paper’s publication follows a separate report by JumpCloud published last week suggesting cybersecurity-specific funding might be at risk.