The average annual security breach cost for a large UK firm is £36,500, but the hidden, long term costs of a data breach can be much larger. Read on to discover the true cost of being hacked.
Secrets exposed
Whether it’s customers’ sensitive data, your secret recipe, blueprints for the building or designs for your next collection, chance are your business has secrets that you want to keep to yourself! Once information is leaked in a hack there’s no saying how far it could go… That’s why we always advise organisations to install a trustworthy anti spam software such as Mail Cleaner. Prevention is always better than a cure!
Reputation
Every time a well known brand or business falls victim to a hacking scandal we see it flood the headlines (and our timelines). News travels fast in the information age and this means your customers and clients can lose faith in your organisation in a heartbeat. Research shows that up to a third of customers in retail, finance and healthcare will cease to do business with organisations that have been breached. It’s not just the loss of existing customers that businesses have to deal with, we also often see see that companies who have faced a serious data breach struggle much more to acquire new customers.
Legal ramifications
Depending on the scale of the breach, what data was stolen and how the situation was handled, your business could stand to face court proceedings and fines. Privacy laws dictate that businesses could be liable for huge fines if they don’t disclose a data breach even if the data that was stolen was simply email addresses. The responsibility of identifying and reporting exactly what data was stolen falls to your organisation.
It’s predicted that by 2019, the global annual cost of cybercrime will reach $2 trillion, can you afford to leave your business unprotected? Ensure your business is professionally protected from spam, viruses and hackers with MailCleaner, an anti spam gateway installed between your mail infrastructure and the internet.