According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report In 2021, data breach costs rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, exhibiting the highest average total cost in the 17-year history of their report.

A new report from the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) has revealed that data breaches have become more costly for medium and large businesses in the UK.  The report shows how medium-sized and large firms lost an average of £19,400 in 2021. This is an increase on 2020 where the reported number was £13,400. Interestingly, when we consider businesses of all sizes, the amount dropped to £4,200. This is a significant decrease from £8,460 in 2020.

Every year, many reports like this provide insight into what is happening around us and the ever-increasing costs of data breaches and cyber attacks. They are valuable because they give us insights into the price, the methods used, and how organisations respond to the increasing threats. However, we need to treat these reports with a degree of caution because they do not, and cannot, offer an accurate depiction of what is happening out in our digital universe and the impact of data breaches. This is not a complaint of the researchers themselves, but rather an observation that there are just too many factors we are not considering when calculating the size of the problem or the cost of the impact.

Although reporting on the financial impact of a data breach is essential and valuable, it is too arbitrary and does not give us the actual cost of a breach which is harder to quantify.  Of course, it’s a good statistic to take to the board room and justify your cybersecurity budget, but we should also consider the less tangible impact of a breach (Read more...)