Ponemon Institute has released its Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study (sponsored by ArcSight, an HP Company).   The study surveyed 50 U.S. larger-sized companies, e.g. companies with more than 700 enterprise seats connected to networks/systems.

Summary results include:

*Median annual cost of cyber crime is nearly $6 million, which is an over 50 percent increase from last year’s study results.

*More than 1 successful cyber attack each week is commonplace.

*Cyber attacks are typically generated by malicious code, denial of service, device theft and web-based attacks.

*Detection of the attack and recovery from it are the most expensive internal activities arising from an attack; information loss is the greatest external cost.

*Defense, financial service, utility and energy sectors have higher cybercrime costs than retail, hospitality and consumer product industries.

*Study results  reveal cyber attack threat as not greatly impacted by the heavy use of cloud computing.

 *Average number of days to resolve the cyber attack is 18.

Read more about the study and take a look back at cyber crime in 2005 (back when companies didn’t like to admit they experienced cyber crime).