Economic loss is the financial impact of a cyber event. Direct costs can include incident response, forensic investigation, system recovery, and legal expenses. Indirect costs may include lost revenue from downtime, disrupted operations, customer impact, or reputational damage.
Measuring these losses helps organizations assess risk, prioritize security spending, and evaluate resilience. In real attacks, the total can combine costs that are recorded differently or estimated using different assumptions, making comparisons unreliable unless definitions and accounting methods are consistent. Defenders can improve tracking by documenting confirmed incidents and recording costs by category, while keeping attempted attacks distinct from events that caused measurable harm.