Counting the human cost of data breaches

Around 30 percent of employees who have been involved in the aftermath of a cyber incident have missed an important personal event. Some had to work overnight (32 percent) or suffered additional stress (33 percent), while 27 percent have had to cancel vacations.

A new report from Kaspersky highlights the human side of cybersecurity incidents by examining the discomfort and losses employees face following corporate breaches.

Work related stress impacts personal relationships according to 76 percent of employees, with 16 percent reporting they even quit their current job because of it. Cybersecurity incidents are a major contributor to negative work experience.

If a data breach occurs, IT and IT security teams have to investigate the incident, make the necessary updates, fix the system and take measures to prevent an attack being repeated. As a result, a third of managers worked overnight or had to incur overtime at work (33 percent for SMBs and 32 percent for enterprises). This has also resulted in other tasks and deadlines being pushed back in more than a quarter of both SMBs (27 percent) and enterprises (26 percent).

"When talking about corporate cybersecurity incidents, we often focus on the effect it has on business like financial loss, customer trust and other corporate consequences, but there is another aspect to consider such as how employees deal with such cases," says Alena Reva, vice president of human resources Americas at Kaspersky. "It's needless to say that additional stress at work or a disrupted work-life balance affects employee’s productivity and, even more critically, their mental and physical health. This shouldn’t be underestimated as these factors can affect business if staff members share their negative feelings outside the organization, impairing its reputation and brand as an employer. This can be especially critical for businesses that recently experienced data breach as its wider reputation is already under attack."

You can find out more in the full report which also includes tips on reducing the negative human impact of breaches.

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