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A new report has revealed that cybercrime costs £226 billion every year. To put this in perspective, this is nearly as much as global drugs trade.

Computer security software firm McAfee have claimed that cybercrime is now worth an estimated 0.8% of the global economy.

Raj Samani, chief technical officer of McAfee EMEA stated, “In the past, studies such as this have relied on surveys. We commissioned a think-tank to work with economists and intellectual property lawyers, as well as the security industry, to understand the true impact of cybercrime.”

The UK didn’t rank particularly favourably in the report as it was ranked 5^th in the G20 countries that are most affected by cybercrime, with an annual loss of £6.8 billion.

It was also estimated that cybercrime leads to around 150,000 job losses in Europe each year.

Cybercriminals are developing more sophisticated attacks as each month passes due to the potential financial rewards. They have taken advantage of companies taking a very relaxed attitude towards data security who persist on using outdated and unsuitable security programs.

Mark Sparshott, EMEA director of security firm Proofpoint stated, “The volumes of attacks are increasing because it is a profitable business model for organised crime. With cybercrime there is no risky getaway because the attack is routed through hundreds or thousands of PCs in dozens of countries, making it almost impossible to trace. The internet makes most attacks anonymous and untraceable and that is really attractive to cybercriminals.”

Cybercrime has had an unprecedented impact on companies which has resulted in some companies ceasing to exist. It has also cost companies hundreds and thousands of pounds due to data loss and reputational damage.

In one case, a British company revealed that it had incurred revenue losses of £770 million because of one cyber-attack due to the loss of intellectual property.

It is now critical that all companies ensure that they have the best security plan in place and regularly test it to help protect themselves against the threat of cyber hackers and cyber thieves. This should be supported with a robust backup solution to ensure that data can always be recovered no matter what action a hacker or cyber thieves takes such as modifying or deleting the data.

The�sophistication and�number of attacks by�cyber-criminals�has increased at a dramatic rate over the last few years and therefore the speed in which a data breach is detected is vital. Being able to detect a data breach in the shortest period of time will significantly help reduce the potential impact that it will have. This should be complemented by a robust backup solution where if a data breach was successful and data was modified or deleted, the data could be restored back to the desired state.

Security technology company, McAfee, conducted a survey where 500 IT professionals from the USA, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia were asked questions about how quickly they believed that they could recognise a data breach.

Out of the 500 participants, 22 percent of them reported that they would need at least a day to recognise a data breach. A greater concern and obvious area of improvement for some of the participants is that 5 percent of them stated that it would take them at least a week to recognise a data breach. Meanwhile, just over 33 percent of the participants stated that they would be able to recognise a data breach within a matter of minutes.

Despite such statistics being suggested, 58 percent of the participants admitted that they had suffered from a data breach within the last year and only 25 percent of them claimed that they recognised the data breach within a matter of minutes.

Mike Fey who is McAfee�s CTO stated, �If you�re in a fight, you need to know that while it�s happening, not after the fact. This study has shown what we�ve long suspected – that far too few organisations have real-time access to the simple question �am I being breached?�� Only by knowing this, can you stop it from happening.�

With such statistics gathered in this latest study, the importance of having a robust backup solution is becoming ever more important. If you cannot detect a data breach before it is too late and critical data is modified or deleted, this could have a detrimental impact on the running of the company and its reputation.

As the people who devise and implement the attacks keep creating ever more sophisticated attacks, the security developers are struggling to keep up, let alone be ahead of them. By all means, it is important to have effective security measures in place but the only way to ensure that you can always recover your data is to have a robust backup solution in place that is regularly tested.

How quickly can you detect a data breach? Do you have a robust backup solution in place?