The breaking news has found that a major, global cyber attack could trigger an average of $53 billion of economic losses, a figure on par with catastrophic natural disaster such as US Superstom Sandy in 2012. IT security experts from AlienVault and Kaspersky Lab commented below.
Javvad Malik, Security Advocate at AlienVault:
“Large figures like $53bn can sometimes be difficult to rationalise by businesses. However, the point that should be taken away from this study is that digital is a critical component of all businesses today. You’d be hard pushed to find any business that doesn’t have a reliance on digital in one form or another, in particular the cloud. Businesses should evaluate what would happen if their cloud services were compromised, breached, or unavailable. It’s imperative that businesses invest in threat detection and response capabilities that can not only alert on issues as they arise, but enable business resiliency to minimise customer impact.”
David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab:
“These are big numbers, but they don’t mean much unless terms such as ‘serious cyber-attack’ are quantified. How can we assess the global cost of an attack? It could mean anything from a temporary interruption of service to the takeover of customer systems – with very different costs.
“It’s important for companies to conduct their own risk assessment and develop a strategy that’s designed to secure corporate systems and mitigate the risk of an attack on those systems.”
