The cost of cyberattacks can be overwhelming. Because criminals are constantly adapting to the security we put in place, we are constantly trying keep up. They are also no longer dealing in small attacks, they are bolder and better at achieving more and more invasive and costly attacks. The cost of cyberattacks is more than monetary. The attacks can invade your privacy, expose information, exploit private pictures and cost people life savings on a personal level. On a company level, losing customer information (credit card information, social security numbers, access to financial accounts) can ruin the company and their relations with other businesses and clients. Recovering after that kind of breech depends on the company and how much thought went into their contingency plan if an attacker was able to break through their security. “The Cisco 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study shows that there is a lot of work to be done to protect ourselves. To gauge the perceptions of defenders on the state of security in their organizations, we asked chief information security officers (CISOs) and security operations (SecOps) managers in several countries and at organizations of various sizes about their security resources and procedures. The Cisco 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study offers insights on security practices currently in use, and compares these results with those of the 2017, 2016, and 2015 studies. The research involved more than 3,600 respondents across 26 countries. Breaches cause real economic damage to organizations, damage that can take months or years to resolve. According to study respondents, more than half (53 percent) of all attacks resulted in financial damages of more than US $500,000, including, but not limited to, lost revenue, customers, opportunities, and out-of-pocket costs (Figure 40) (Cisco 2018).
As the criminals become more sophisticated in their attacks they are able to steal more. We may not even have any recourse, because they are so hard to catch. The internet provides a certain amount of anonymity that makes it difficult to apprehend them.
