The average cost of cyber crime increased 23 percent to $11.7 million per organization in 2017, representing 62 percent increase in the last five years.
Companies in the United States incurred average cost at $21.22 million.
Germany experienced the most significant increase in total cyber crime costs from $7.84 million to $11.15 million.
This surge follows a recent string of infamous malware attacks including WannaCry and Petya, which cost several global firms hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues, according to new research published today by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and the Ponemon Institute.
The “Cost of Cyber Crime Study” surveyed 2,182 security and IT professionals in 254 organizations worldwide.
A company suffers 130 breaches per year, a 27.4 percent increase over 2016 and double what it was five years ago.
Companies in the financial services and energy sectors are the worst hit, with an average annual cost of $18.28 million and $17.20 million respectively.
The time to resolve issues is showing similar increases. Among the most time-consuming incidents are those involving malicious insiders, which take on average 50 days to mitigate while ransomware takes an average of more than 23 days.
Malware and Web-based attacks are the two most costly attack types with companies spending an average of $2.4 million and $2 million respectively.
“The costly and devastating consequences businesses are suffering, as a result of cyber crime, highlights the growing importance of strategically planning and closely monitoring security investments,” said Kelly Bissell, managing director of Accenture Security.
Of the 9 security technologies evaluated, the highest percentage spend was on advanced perimeter controls.
Companies deploying advanced perimeter controls security solutions only realized an operational cost savings of $1 million associated with identifying and remediating cyber attacks, suggesting possible inefficiencies in the allocation of resources.
Spend on security intelligence systems, defined as tools that ingest intelligence from various sources that help companies identify and prioritize internal and external threats, delivered cost savings of $2.8 million, higher than all other technology types included in this study.
Automation, orchestration and machine learning technologies were only deployed by 28 percent of organizations – the lowest of the technologies surveyed – yet provided the third highest cost savings for security technologies overall at $2.2 million.
43 percent mentioned that the most damaging from cyber attacks is loss of information.
The cost of business disruption, such as business process failures following an attack, has decreased from 39 percent in 2015 to 33 percent in this year’s research.
Australia reports the lowest total average cost from a cyber attack at $5.41 million.
United Kingdom had the lowest change over the last year from $7.21 million to $8.74 million.
Japan experienced a 22 percent increase in costs to $10.45 million – the third highest increase of the countries in the survey.
U.S. companies are spending more to resolve all types of cyber attacks, especially for malware and Web-based attacks ($3.82 million and $3.40 million per incident, respectively).
23 percent of total annual cyber incident costs are due to malware attacks for Germany and Australia companies.
20 percent of the total cyber crime annual costs are attributed to Web-based attacks in France. Denial of service attacks account for 15 percent of total cyber crime annual costs in both Germany and the United Kingdom.
