The enormous cost associated with cyberattacks continues to hit the headlines. In recent weeks alone, T-Mobile has agreed to pay $500 million following a class action lawsuit connected to a cyberattack last year that exposed the personal data of over 76 million people. In addition, the company also committed to invest over $150 million in additional security measures over the next two years.
Despite the scale of this settlement, it still represents the tip of the iceberg across the world as a whole, with the financial damage continuing to mount. But who pays these bills? According to a new report by IBM, the burden falls heavily on consumers, with nearly two-thirds (60%) of businesses that had been breached subsequently raising their product prices.
The annual ‘Cost of a Data Breach Report’ shared a range of alarming trends, not least that the global average financial impact of a breach has reached an all-time high of $4.35 million – up by 13% over the last two years alone.
What’s more, paying for a breach isn’t just about settling a one-off bill, no matter how large. The report points out that 83% of organizations have been on the receiving end of a breach more than once, while nearly 50% of costs are incurred more than a year after the breach. The idea that suffering a breach is ‘not a question of if, but when’ needs to be replaced with ‘not a question of if or when, but how often?’
Critical infrastructure costs
Looking at the impact of breaches on critical infrastructure organizations, in particular, the report points out that “almost 80% of critical infrastructure organizations studied don’t adopt zero trust strategies, seeing average breach costs rise to $5.4 million – a $1.17 million increase compared to those that do.”
Failure to adopt zero-trust cybersecurity processes and technologies leaves organizations at ongoing risk of damaging and expensive incidents. At Glasswall, we deliver zero-trust file protection, keeping organizations secure from file-based threats with CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction) technology.
Instead of looking for malicious content, Glasswall’s zero-trust file protection treats all files as untrusted — validating, rebuilding and cleaning each file to a safe and compliant standard — automatically removing potential threats.
With Glasswall CDR, only safe, clean and fully functioning files enter and leave an organization, allowing users to access files with full confidence.
By implementing Glasswall CDR, security teams need no longer choose between complete file security or speed and usability. Unlike other CDR vendors who flatten files, Glasswall CDR provides rapid zero-trust file protection that maintains original document usability. There is no dependence on antivirus databases to provide knowledge of a new threat, and security teams no longer deal with disruptions from quarantining files or false positives.
We are set apart from the crowd by our capability to instantly return files to their manufacturer’s ‘known-good’ specification. Each processed document is risk-free, fully functioning and visually identical to the original.
This proactive defense enables organizations to prevent future attacks while giving users the freedom to access files safely. With cybercrime set to cost the world $10.5 trillion by 2025 – a figure higher than the GDP of any country in the world with the exception of China and the U.S., – organizations need to focus on minimizing their exposure to the spiralling costs of a breach.
