One Breach = $1 Million To $53 Million In Damages Per Year, Report Says - DarkReading

Data breaches are costing companies millions each year, according to the studies cited in the following article.

Organizations are getting hit by at least one successful attack per week, and the annualized cost to their bottom lines from the attacks ranged from $1 million to $53 million per year, according to a newly published benchmark study of 45 U.S. organizations hit by data breaches.

The independent Ponemon Institute's “The First Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study” (PDF), which was sponsored by ArcSight, showed a median cost of $3.8 million for an attack per year, a price tag that includes everything from detection, investigation, containment, and recovery to any post-response operations. “Information theft was still the highest consequence — the type of information [stolen] ranged from a data breach of people's [information] to intellectual property and source code,” says Larry Ponemon, CEO of the Ponemon Institute. “We found that detection and discovery are the most expensive [elements].”

And a separate report called “The Leaking Vault” (PDF) released today by the Digital Forensics Association found that among the 2,807 publicly disclosed data breaches worldwide during the past five years, the cost to the victim firms as well as those whose information was exposed came to whopping $139 billion.

The article goes on to say:

“It seemed that the majority of the 45 organizations were random and haphazard in their approach” to the problem, Ponemon says. “They didn’t have the right tools or technologies, and they didn’t know what kinds of threats there were and that the actual attacks were happening” until afterward. One finding in the report gave a nod to SEIM tools: Organizations with a SIEM solution incurred 24 percent less costs of the breach than those that did not.

This point illustrates the need for organizations to take a more proactive approach to their data security. Tools (such as liveForensics) can help organizations monitor and stay one step ahead of security issues. A small investment up front could save a fortune down the road.

via One Breach = $1 Million To $53 Million In Damages Per Year, Report Says – DarkReading.