The cost of a ransomware attack can be considerable. Several attacks in the United States have seen payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars made for the keys to unlock the encryption. While those payments are certainly high, they are a fraction of the total cost of a ransomware attack which are usually several times the cost of any ransom payment.
Recovery without paying a ransom can be considerably more. The ransomware attack on the city of Baltimore saw a ransom demand of around $76,000 issued. Baltimore refused to pay. The attack is estimated to have cost the city at least $18.2 million.
The cost of that ransomware attack is high, but nowhere the cost of a suspected September 2019 ransomware attack on the Danish hearing aid manufacturer Demant. The firm experienced the attack on or around September 3, 2019. One month on and the firm still hasn’t recovered. In a recent message to its investors, the firm said the cyberattack would cost an estimated $80 million to $95 million, even though the company held a cyber insurance policy. Without that policy the bill would have been $14.6 million higher.
According to a notice on the firm’s website, it experienced “a critical incident” when its “IT infrastructure was hit by cyber-crime.” Ransomware was not mentioned by the firm although it has been reported as a ransomware attack by the Danish media.
The attack impacted its Polish production and distribution facilities, French cochlear implants production sites, Mexican production and service sites, its amplifier production site in Denmark, its entire Asia-Pacific network, and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
The firm is recovering its IT infrastructure and believes it will take a further two weeks for systems to be restored and business operations to approach normality. However, the effects of the attack are expected to be long-lasting.
The inability to access its systems across all these areas has caused major disruption to the company. The firm has been unable to supply its products, receive and process orders, and clinics in its network have had difficulty servicing end users.
Due to the limited information released it is unclear whether the company refused to pay a ransom, if the attackers could not supply valid keys to unlock the encryption, of if this was a sabotage attack akin to the NotPetya wiper malware attacks of 2017.
If this was a ransomware attack, the losses far exceed those of the Norwegian aluminum and energy company Norsk Hydro, whose ransomware attack cost the firm around $70 million, although it is a fraction of the cost of the NotPetya attacks on the shipping firm Maersk and FedEx, both of which caused losses of around $300 million.
These incidents all demonstrate just how damaging cyberattacks can be and the massive costs of recovery. As is typical, the cost of recovering its IT systems accounted for a small proportion of the total cost – around $7.3 million. The bulk of the losses were due to lost sales and the inability to process orders, which the company says make up around half of the estimated losses.
In a press release, the firm said in addition to the lost sales, “the incident has prevented us from executing our ambitious growth activities in some of the most important months of the year – particularly in the US, which is our biggest market.”
Malware, ransomware and wiper malware are most commonly delivered via a small number of attack vectors. All too often they start with a phishing email, exploitation of RDP, drive-by malware download, or the exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities. The cost of preventative measures to block these attack vectors is pocket change by comparison to the cost of recovery from an attack.
TitanHQ cannot help businesses with securing RDP and patching promptly, but we can help businesses secure the email system and protect against drive-by malware downloads and other web-based attacks.
To find out more about how you can improve security against email- and web-based attacks, from a cost of as little as 90 cents per user per month, give our sales team a call.
The sales team will be happy to explain the ins and outs of our web and email security solutions, schedule product demonstrations, and help set you up for a free trial of our SpamTitan email security and WebTitan web security solutions and greatly improve your defenses against phishing, ransomware, malware, and wiper attacks.