A data breach can have drastic consequences for businesses. A company’s failure to keep their customers’ or employees’ information secure can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue and heavy penalties and can cause a big dent on the company’s market reputation.
Some of the most common effects of a data breach include loss of sensitive data, damaging downtime, loss of intellectual property, and significant revenue loss.
But there are many other damaging, long-term effects of a data breach that can impact a business such as hidden costs that might include regulatory fines for non-compliance. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legalization raised the maximum penalty for contraventions to up to approximately $21.59m or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher.
Imagine having to pay millions of dollars to regulatory authorities while compensating your customers’ who lost their sensitive data due to the data breach, running cybersecurity audits, forensic investigations, and losing more revenue while trying to recover from the loss in market valuation and reputation.
This could lead to a lot of pressure on businesses, especially small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) that may not have sufficient resources to fight a data breach and recover from its aftermath.
According to Gartner, global cybersecurity spending is estimated to reach $133.7 billion by 2022. While business leaders are striving to make cybersecurity a high priority, attackers are leveraging technologies such as automated tools to conduct more sophisticated attacks that are hard to detect.
Some of the most common cybersecurity attacks include phishing, malware, social engineering, XSS attacks, SQL Injection cheat sheet, and password cracking.
While most of these attacks are traditional and security leaders are well aware of them, attackers are constantly changing how they attack an organization and developing new ways to circumvent security safeguards.
Business leaders have to stay informed about new threats to ensure that their organizations are well protected and are not vulnerable to data breaches. While one can quantify the recovery costs and loss of revenue, the costs in terms of credibility and reputation are immeasurable.
Here are some of the most concerning long-term effects of a data breach that you should know about:
