In today’s digital age, cyber attacks pose significant threats to all organisations, with impacts ranging from direct financial losses to long‑term reputational damage. Although common perceptions often focus on publicly reported losses, the true extent of cyber incidents includes various hidden costs that rarely brought to public light.

Here are six often overlooked or underestimated financial consequences of cyber attacks.

1. Elevated insurance premiums

Following a cyber incident, organisations can face substantial premium increases or even denial of cyber risk coverage by insurers. Factors affecting future premium costs can include plans for incident response improvement, potential legal action, and the perceived maturity of the company’s cyber security programme.

2. Disruption to operations

Cyber attacks will inevitably disrupt normal business operations. However, the cost impacts can be long-lasting, resulting from repairing and replacing equipment, diverting resources, or increasing resources to support alternative or manual business processes to cover temporarily shut down systems. In addition, losses can also be sustained from not being able to deliver goods or services within previously agreed timeframes.

3. Cost of debt increase

Organisations who experience a cyber incident can encounter higher interest rates when raising or renegotiating debt, due to perceived higher risk. Credit-rating agencies typically downgrade the credit rating of companies that have experienced a cyber incident.

4. Loss of customer relationships and eroded market share

Measuring and tracking the number of lost customers or clients in the early aftermath of a breach can be challenging. However, the loss of customers, termination of contracts and depletion of potential opportunities from those customers will require a business to invest significant resources to recover revenue and market share back to pre-incident levels.

5. Intellectual property theft

In addition to direct monetary gain, cyber attacks often target intellectual property (IP). Consequently, incidents that result in the theft or compromise of IP can lead to direct revenue loss as competitors can exploit stolen IP. This can also erode a company’s competitive advantage, especially if a business’s competitors gain access to proprietary technology, strategic plans, or trade secrets. Undertaking legal action to protect or enforce those intellectual property rights is likely to be costly.

6. Devaluation of brand value

The impacts on an organisation’s reputation and brand value can have long-lasting effects on a trading name, to the detriment of its market position. In particular, any history of a cyber incident affecting a brand will likely damage consumer and affiliate trust, influencing product or service consideration.

Understanding the full spectrum of impacts that can result from a breach is the best way to inform a rigorous and well-considered cyber security strategy. Engaging a security partner who applies knowledge of how a business operates into their incident recovery plans can help minimise hidden costs, enhancing their resilience and optimising their ability to overcome a cyber-attack.

Reach out to our team of specialists to learn more about maturing your cyber security and staying fortified online.