The Cost of New Breaches

Earlier this week IBM Security released the results of a global study examining the full financial impact of a data breach on a company’s bottom line. 

Overall, the report found that the hidden costs in data breaches — lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery — are difficult and expensive to manage. One-third of the cost of “mega breaches” (1 million lost records or more) were derived from lost business.

So what was the average cost of a data breach globally? $3.86 million, which was up 6.4 percent from their 2017 report.

Based on in-depth interviews with nearly 500 companies that experienced a data breach, the study analyzes hundreds of cost factors surrounding a breach, from technical investigations and recovery, to notiifications, legal and regulatory activities, and cost of lost business and reputation.

This year, the study also calculated those “mega breach” costs, projecting that those involving lost records ranging from 1 million to 50 million cost companies between $40 million and $350 million respectively.

Some other sound bytes:

• Average cost of a data breach of 1 million compromised records is nearly $40 million dollars
• At 50 million records, estimated total cost of a breach is $350 million dollars
• The vast majority of these breaches (10 out of 11) stemmed from malicious and criminal attacks (as opposed to system glitches or human error)
• The average time to detect and contain a mega breach was 365 days – almost 100 days longer than a smaller scale breach (266 days)

You can download the 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study here.