A new report from IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) shows that these attacks have been on the rise, posing a growing threat to a wide variety of businesses that may not consider themselves an obvious target.

Key findings include:

• Massive destruction, massive costs: Destructive attacks are costing multinational companies $239 million on average. As a point of comparison, this is 61 times more costly than the average cost of a data breach ($3.92 million).
• The long road to recovery: The debilitating nature of these attacks requires a lot of resources and time to respond and remediate, with companies on average requiring 512 hours from their incident response team. It’s also common for organizations to use multiple companies to handle the response and remediation, which would increase hours even further.
• RIP laptops: A single destructive attack destroys 12,000 machines per company on average — creating quite a tab for new devices in order to get companies’ workforce back in action.

How should your organization respond to keep from being a victim?

In addition to the bottom row of the infographic above, we have put together cybersecurity essentials – a simple list which will help most organizations become far more secure.

Please go to a phishing simulation vendor now and sign up for one of their offerings. Phishing Box, KnowBe4 and Phish360 are all great.

We also recommend you get a free evaluation of your cybersecurity risk from an MSP/MSSP immediately.