The impact of cyber-attacks can be bruising for a business with both short and long term effects to consider.

A 2016 survey of 428 businesses that have suffered cyber-attacks in the previous months.

You can see from the statistics above for 2016, that the biggest impact reported by businesses that have suffered from cyber-attacks is the provision of new measures to prevent further attacks. This can be costly but is essential to protect against further attacks.

There are the short term issues:-

• Bringing in expert technical staff to find out how the attack happened
• Technical expertise needed to start to build defences against further such attacks
• Extra staff to deal with recovery, communications with customers, legal ramifications etc.
• Disruption to staff and service to customers

Then there are the long term effects:-

• Reputation damage
• Steps needed to restore reputation and customer confidence
• Share price

It is better to build strong defences against cyber-attacks than simply trust to luck.

It is prudent to have plans in place for how to deal with such attacks as the FBI now say that it’s not a question of whether any organisation will be attacked, but simply when.

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