Barracuda Networks has published its 2023 Email Security Trends report that shows how email-based security attacks affect organizations around the world.
75 percent of the organizations surveyed for the report had been impacted by at least one successful email attack in the last 12 months, with those affected facing average potential costs of more than $1 million for their most expensive attack. 23 percent said that the cost of email-based attacks has risen dramatically over the last year.
The survey, conducted by independent research firm Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Barracuda, questioned IT professionals from frontline to the most senior roles in companies with 100 to 2,500 employees, across a range of industries in the US, EMEA, and APAC.
The fallout from an email security attack can be significant. The most widely reported effects were downtime and business disruption (affecting 44 percent of those that had been hit), the loss of sensitive, confidential, and business-critical data (43 percent), and damage to brand reputation (41 percent).
There were notable differences between industries. For example, financial services organizations were particularly affected by the loss of valuable data and money to attackers (cited by 59 percent and 51 percent of victims, respectively), while in manufacturing the top impact was the disruption of business operations (53 percent). For healthcare institutions the recovery costs involved in getting systems up and running again quickly were the most significant (44 percent). Regardless of size or industry, however, organizations with more than half their employees working remotely faced higher levels of risk and recovery costs.
Organizations also feel underprepared to deal with the threat of malware and viruses (34 percent), advanced email attacks like account takeover (30 percent) and business email compromise (28 percent), and even more basic threats like spam (28 percent).
