Data leaks happen very quickly, even faster than brewing coffee. In fact, 93% of successful data breach attacks occur in less than a minute. In fact, 80% of affected companies only realized it weeks later.
Data leaks and breaches can destroy a company. According to Security Intelligence, 60% of small and medium businesses will go out of business six months after being hit by a cyberattack. While larger companies and agencies are unlikely to go out of business, they will also suffer serious impacts.
What are the impacts of data leaks?
Loss of income
Security breaches causing lost revenue are common. When potential customers find your company website not working, they may turn to other options. Downtime of any IT system can cause work disruptions making the possibility of repairing the affected parts longer.
Damaging brand reputation
Not just short-term revenue, security breaches can also impact your brand’s long-term reputation. Customers will want to protect their privacy and will be hesitant to trust a business with a history of poor data security.
Intellectual property is lost
Lost revenue and damaged reputation are catastrophic for the survival of any business. However, hackers don’t stop there. In some cases, these hackers also target companies’ designs, strategies, and blueprints.
The threat of loss of intellectual property is highest for manufacturing and construction industry businesses. Although small businesses tend to believe they will not be targets of intellectual property theft, the fact is that 60% of hacks target small businesses. Hackers target them because small businesses are easier to attack.
Ultimately, losing intellectual property can impact the competitiveness of your business. Your competitors will not hesitate to take advantage of the information that hackers have stolen, one way is by buying the information from the black market.
Hidden costs
Data leaks require companies to pay a number of costs to repair the damage. However, these costs are just the beginning. There are many hidden costs associated with this data leak.
One example of hidden costs that must be paid is legal fees. Then, you may need money for marketing, investigations, and increased insurance premiums. Depending on applicable law, you may also be subject to fines by the relevant institution due to your negligence which causes consumer harm.
Experiencing online vandalism
Some hackers have a prankster nature. When hacking a site, they may change the content of the website. Although it seems relatively harmless, this online vandalism can actually cause a lot of damage. Moreover, if they change things that sometimes go unnoticed.
For example, hackers can change some letters or numbers on your contact page. This causes potential customers to not be able to contact you when they want to order your product. Then, these nosy hackers can also add vulgar content to your web pages.
Difficulty getting new employees
Not only will it be detrimental to customers and company finances, data leaks will also be troublesome for employee recruitment teams in the future. Cyber attack cases result in employee turnover, especially at the executive level. Some will be fired because of the impact of the violation.
Some who are not fired may resign due to the stress associated with incident mitigation. Guilt and stress will also trickle down to staff levels, resulting in staff turnover.
Then, until the time when you have to replace or add employees. This is not easy. New employees who will occupy executive positions must start by cleaning up the company after data hacking incidents etc.
Meanwhile, in IT and security professionals who are at the forefront of maintaining networks, the demand for these positions to be filled by people with high skills will increase. In fact, IT and security professionals may refuse to work for companies with broken security systems. This makes your team’s work much more difficult and extends the mitigation time until the site and network are back to normal.
Investing more in IT can help you detect and prevent various cyber attacks that can have a big impact on the company. Contact CS Hypernet now to get trusted IT solutions.
