What is the real cost of a data breach?
The audit is one step of the process. Once the risks identified have been addressed, IT security policy is written, risk management standards set and people trained, you can feel confident that probability of a breach has been significantly lessened. Then, you will sleep better at night. You will have prevented paying large sums of money to clean up the mess of being hacked. Read on to find out the true cost of a data breach.
With the average cost of data breaches rising – including per-record costs of each breach – it’s high time most enterprises are going to have to get serious about changing their approach to infosec
As 2017 gets further in our rear-view mirror, many are saying that 2018 should bring changes to their approach to information security. 80 percent of survey respondents in the U.S. and U.K. say they’ll change how they approach security, with most either switching managed service providers or switching from internal to third party resources, many for the first time.
Ponemon Institute estimates an average breach cost of $3.5 million in 2017, with a 27% probability that a U.S. company will experience a breach in the next 24 months that costs them between $1.1M and $3.8M. If you multiply Ponemon’s estimated per-record cost for a breach, split out by industry vertical, many of the breaches listed at the end of this article would potentially cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There are other cost factors: Yahoo’s acquisition by Verizon saw a $350M reduction in purchase price due to a loss of 1.5 billion records. The IRS estimates that due to a scheme involving the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, used to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), it cost the government (and taxpayers) $30 million in fraudulent tax returns. Health insurer Anthem has agreed to a $115 million settlement in connection with a breach that impacted 80 million of their customers. It’s interesting to note that if multiplied by Ponemon’s estimated per-record breach cost of $380 for the health vertical, their liability would have been over $3 billion. Read more »