Cost of cyber crime rises rapidly as attacks increase

Shipping containers could not be booked, lawyers were locked out of their laptops and a production line was prevented from churning out chocolates, as serious cyber attacks swept through major companies earlier this year.

Large multinationals from Mondelez to Moller-Maersk, Reckitt Benckiser to FedEx, were forced to warn shareholders that the ‘NotPetya’ cyber attack had hit their bottom line, costing each company hundreds of millions of dollars. They said that the extent of the damage to their finances was not yet known but projected that the year’s revenue would be hit.

The rapidly spreading attack highlighted that what matters for most corporate boards is the cost. Never mind the stories of shady criminals, nation state hacking factories and dark web marketplaces packed with stolen data, this is about the bottom line.

Charles Carmakal, vice-president at Mandiant, part of FireEye, has personally responded to hundreds of breaches. He said some companies are still conducting postmortems to figure out the impact of NotPetya. The June attack, which exploited a vulnerability in Ukrainian accounting software, ended up being much more extensive than WannaCry, a ransomware worm that swept through systems in May.

“It was a state sponsored attack against Ukrainian business and way of life but non-Ukrainian victims were likely collateral damage,” he said. “Most of the cost is the loss of business, the inability to generate revenue but obviously there are possibly millions of dollars worth of IT costs for rebuilding systems.”