Average Cost of a Spear Phishing Incident: $1.6Mn

When it comes to cybersecurity, email remains a prime attack vector for criminals. A full 90% of respondents in a recent survey whose organization experienced a spear phishing attack within the past year said that the attacks targeted employees’ email—at a cost that ranges into the millions per incident.The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne and sponsored by Cloudmark, found that in the past 12 months, spear phishing was responsible for 38 percent of cyber-attacks on their enterprises.Further, the average financial cost of spear phishing attacks (in the last 12 months) among the 88 respondents who had suffered a spear phishing attack was $1.6 million. The vast majority were US companies. For the US businesses, the average cost of spear phishing attacks was $1.8 million.As a result, IT professionals are also increasingly concerned about spear phishing attacks. Nearly three-quarters of IT decision makers feel that that spear phishing currently poses a significant threat to their organization. And it’s not an unfounded concern: Spear phishing attacks have been associated with multiple recent high-profile data breaches, including those experienced by Target, Sony and the Pentagon.