Cyber crimes can do serious harm to an organization’s bottom line. We found that the median annualized cost of cyber crime for 50 organizations in our study is $5.9 million per year, with a range of $1.5 million to $36.5 million each year per company. This represents an increase in median cost of 56 percent from our first cyber cost study published last year.

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OVERVIEW

Spammer tactics are changing as spam levels flat-lined this quarter to the lowest levels in around three years, primarily due to the highly-publicized Rustock botnet takedown. In contrast, there have been unusually large email-borne malware attacks during the quarter, more than doubling the daily turnover of zombies tracked by Commtouch Labs.

Facebook’s large user-base once again made it a favorite target for attacks, most notably following the death of Osama Bin Laden when Facebook malware promised videos of the event to Facebook ...................

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Spammer tactics are changing

In mid-March, Microsoft led a takedown of the Rustock botnet. The immediate effect on spam levels was a drop of nearly 30% to an average of 119 billion messages per day during the last two weeks of March. In the past, botnet takedowns have resulted in temporary drops in spam levels followed by sustained increases, as spammers created new botnets and resumed mass mailings. The spam levels of this quarter however, suggest that the expected “recovery” of spam might not occur in the near term, and that spammers are changing their tactics. Average daily spam levels for the past year are shown below: See Report Here

Cyber crime escalates; is your business prepared?

Other study findings about the harsh reality of rising cyber crime include: 

• Companies participating in the study averaged 72 attacks per week.
• Malicious code, denial of service, stolen or hijacked devices and malicious insiders are the culprits for the most costly cyber crimes, accounting for more than 90 percent of all cyber crime costs per organization on an annual basis.
• The longer it takes the IT department to resolve the attacks, the more costly they are.  The study found a positive relationship between the time to contain an attack and organizational cost.
• The average time to contain a cyber attack is 18 days, up from 14 days last year.  This year’s average cost to resolve for participating organizations is $415,748, a 67 percent increase from last year’s estimated average cost of $247,744.
• Malicious insider attacks can take more than 45 days on average to resolve.

Based on Blog-post by Judy Redman, HP Blogger