According to the research "Corporate IT Security Risks 2016 "held by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International and in which more than 4.000 million participatedfacebusinesses from 25 countries, a single attack DDoS can cost a company over $1,6 millions, although this size is highly dependent on how quickly the attack is detected.
Companies of different sizes who received DDoS attacks during the last 12 months were asked about the amount of costs incurred by them. As it turned out, for medium and large businesses (20% and 19% respectively), higher costs were caused by changes in their credit and insurance ratings, which is no surprise considering many DDoS attacks become publicly known.
For small businesses, the biggest costs from DDoS attacks were in overtime pay for them employees (17%). Furthermore, DDoS attacks were cited as one of the top five threats that could force companies to hire new employees. In particular, 37% of the organizations that fell victim to such attacks are already planning to significantly increase their IT staff.
Other significant costs associated with DDoS attacks included customer compensation (12%), upgrading of IT and software infrastructure (10%), staff training (10%), and public relations costs to restore a company's reputation ( 9%). This can cause an average cost of a DDoS attack of around $ 106.000 for smaller companies and up to over $ 1,6 million for larger companies.
An important finding of the study was that if an attack is detected at the earliest 24 hours, costs may be nearly half as compared to an attack detected over a day later.
"Our research shows that DDoS attacks are among the most expensive digital threats that businesses face. It is more expensive than a virus or an "infection" with a cryptomalware program. Even a DDoS attack can disable them online services of a business for a long time, damaging its reputation and depriving existing or future customers. There have been incidents where prolonged DDoS attacks have led to the bankruptcy and closure of successful online businesses. Preventive protection allows a company to quickly locate an ongoing DDoS attack and, in the case of a solution such as Kaspersky DDoS Protection, to be informed as soon as possible of the start time of an attack using the DDoS Intelligence system. This avoids potential risks, said Alexey Kiselev, Project Manager, Kaspersky DDoS Protection.
For more information on DDoS attacks, you can view the reports Kaspersky DDoS Intelligence.
