Security Teams Spend 71 Hours Responding to Every One Hour in a Cyber Attack

New data sheds light on what kinds of cyber attacks are targeting your cybersecurity team, what it’s costing them, why it’s taking so much time to fix, and where you should focus resources.

Barracuda’s Cybernomics 101 report provides a lot of insight into the current economics of cyber attacks.

According to the report:

• 62% of respondents stated cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated
• 55% said those attacks are taking more time to investigate and attempt to mitigate
• 53% of respondents agreed that cyber attacks are becoming more targeted

The average largest ransom any organization paid is $1.38 million, with an average cost of $5.34 million to respond to compromises!

What’s staggering is the average proficient hacker takes just 6 hours to exploit a vulnerability while IT and security teams take an average of 427 hours “investigating, cleaning, fixing, and documenting” successful attacks. That’s 71 good guy hours for every 1 bad actor hour. 

So, cleanup isn’t a profitable business strategy. Then what about stopping attacks?

According to the report, the top three initial attacks are:

• DDOS (experienced by 52% of organizations)
• Phishing / Social Engineering (48%)
• Credential Theft (41%)

Of the top three, two of them rely heavily on users to fall for cleverly-crafted scams and gambits.  Those organizations that continually keep their users educated through security awareness training to remain vigilant when interacting with email and the web are then ones who can mitigate (if not outright stop) two of the three top attack types.

So, 427 hours of your security team’s time, or put security awareness training in place – the choice is yours.

KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 65,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.