'Destructive' cyber attacks will cause businesses to fail

'In 2015 we fully expect a business to fail due to the financial consequences of a cyber attack,' warns Aegis London

Businesses are becoming more vulnerable to ‘destructive' cyber attacks as computer hackers become more sophisticated, and some organisations will fail this year as a direct result.

That's according to Lloyd's insurer Aegis London, which has warned that the costs of being the victim of a cyber attack are becoming increasingly substantial, especially when business-critical enterprise or industrial systems become the targets of hackers and cyber criminals.

Aegis points to the catastrophic cyber attacks on Sony as an example of how being the victim of cyber criminals, hackers or a data breach not only does damage to an organisation's finances, but also plays havoc with the reputation of a business.

"These attacks are now increasingly destructive as we have seen with the recent attack on Sony Entertainment and statistics from the Organisation of American States," said Joe Hancock, cyber security specialist at Aegis London.

"This trend is going to continue, with affected businesses squeezed between a shrinking top-line due to reputational harm and rising costs to get back on their feet.

"In 2015 we fully expect a business to fail due to the financial consequences of a cyber attack," he continued, before arguing how businesses must be prepared to deal with the consequences of being a target for cyber criminals and hackers.

"Cyber attacks are the new normal. It is not enough to say ‘it won't affect us', ‘it wasn't patchable' or that an attack just wasn't detected - the latest ruling shows that claims of negligence may follow, which, if successful, can result in substantial damages and derivative shareholder claims," said Hancock.

The warning from Aegis follows a report which suggested that hackers are targeting critical infrastructure with destructive cyber attacks in an effort to manipulate systems or destroy data rather than steal it.

The survey, by the Organization of American States, found that 40 per cent of businesses had fought against attempts to shut down their computer networks, 44 per cent had encountered outside attempts to delete files and 54 per cent had battled "attempts to manipulate" their control systems.

Computing research has previously demonstrated how industrial control systems are increasingly becoming the target of hackers and cyber criminals as they seek to exploit weaknesses in systems that aren't properly protected.

The security challenges facing the enterprise will be discussed in-depth at Computing's Enterprise Security and Risk Managament Summit later this year.