As per a recent study, it was revealed that the economic losses from major cyber attacks across Asia Pacific has been around US $1.75 Trillion (S$2.3 Trillion) during the previous year. The significant economic damage that was incurred from the cyber attacks on various organizations in Singapore previous year has amounted to S$23.8B (US $17.7 Billion). Here, much of the major loss has been the result of the impact caused on the wider ecosystem and has thus, lead to the overall decrease in individual as well as enterprise spending.

The study that was conducted by Microsoft under the supervision of Frost & Sullivan, had revealed that only around 20 percent of the overall damage caused was due to the direct impact of the cyber attack on the finances of any company because of factors like remediation costs and fines.

The majority percentage of loss around 64 percent, was due to the “induced loss”. This factor, as defined by the research firm, is the impact of the outspread cyber breaching on the wider economy & ecosystem. The study has come up with the significant economic loss model that aim at looking forward to including other parameters as well like customer churning and job loss due to the damage caused to the given reputation of the company.

For a large-scale organization in Singapore having over 500 employees, the overall economic damage from any cybersecurity accident was, on an average, around S$18.5 Million (US $13.8 million). Whenever any cyber attack occurs, the jobs are also placed at higher risk. The given study has revealed that cyber attacks have resulted into job losses throughout different departments in around 57 percent of the organizations in Singapore with several incidents happening around in the past year.

Fengyuan Zhang