How Much Does a Data Breach Cost? Reading the 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study

How much does a data breach cost?

It isn’t a simple question, but the answer is the only way to transmit the urgency of the situation to C-level executives.

The 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study, the 2018 edition of the annual study sponsored by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, provides us an interesting evaluation for the total cost of security breaches.

For the first time, the study analyzed the costs associated with breaches ranging from 1 million to 50 million lost records.

The first information that emerges from the study is that the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, but mega-incidents affecting more than 1 million records are far more expensive.

Figure 1 – Global cost of data breaches

The study revealed that the average total cost of a breach ranges from $2.2 million (for incidents with fewer than 10,000 compromised records) to $6.9 million (for incidents with more than 50,000 compromised records).

Massive security breaches have a cost ranging from $40 million for 1 million records lost to $350 million for 50 million records lost.

A data breach involving 50 million records, for example, would result in a total cost of $350.44 million.

Figure 2 – Average total cost by size of data breaches

The researchers confirmed that the average cost for companies has increased by 6.4% from last year.

While the cost of a data breach increased for organizations in 13 countries compared to the five-year average, experts pointed out that it has decreased in Brazil and Japan.

The majority of security breaches, roughly 48%, are caused by malicious or criminal attacks. The related cost per capita is at $157.

Other causes are human error (27%) with a cost of $131 per capita and system (Read more...)