Companies should Quickly Count the Cost of Cyber Crime

Cybersecurity was ranked 8th among 12 largest specific dangers facing the Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc in their most recent annual report. The risk became real after Petya attacked the giant of the consumer goods last month.

Malware encrypted and then successfully destroyed important data, disrupting the orders, shipping as well as other functions in every company. ft.com posted on July 7th, 2017, stating that neither has completely recovered even after ten days.

Mondelez, who makes Ritz crackers and Oreo cookies, said that the attack shaved 3 percentage points in the growth rate for quarter ending on 30th June, although it expects to recover some lost revenue during upcoming months. Reckitt, famous for Durex condoms and Nurofen painkillers, predicted a 2% sales drop during the quarter, as well as a 1 percentage point reduction in its complete year growth rate, thus adding up to the projected hit to sales of 110 Million Pound.

British company, Reckitt Benckiser, already was beefing up their systems even before the Petya attack, and this was a specific malicious attack as per the expert view. Other multinationals also have suffered. Nevertheless, Reckitt Benckiser is the blue-chip company having substantial financial resources. The company in their latest acquisition of Mead Johnson Nutrition Co., baby formula producer, has spent $18 Bn in cash. Investors can thus assume that organization having this type of stature, have to be in group of large companies who are unaffected by these kinds of events.

The internal investigation is continuing on what has happened. Investors do not know whether the company was exposed because of an employee breaching the internal protocols - by mistakenly opening the attachment - or whether their systems have particular vulnerability.

Initially, it warned that the personal data comprising details of bank accounts of around 4 Million customers were stolen. The shares fell down, and it has suffered customer exodus. Later, actual number of the compromised accounts turned out as only 156,000 people, and out of those, less than 16,000 bank account details had been stolen.

As per Bloomberg Intelligence, this will be most awful year starting of Reckitt Benckiser on record. Each of the acquisition is making the group far more complex, makes distractions as well as made it far more difficult to manage.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/14/2017