The Cost of Data Breaches
The IBM Security “Cost of a Data breach” survey is out [here], and it analyses the ever-increasing costs involved in data breaches. It involves a survey of 524 companies who have recently had a data breach (between August 2019 and April 2020) and covers over 17 countries, and 17 different sectors.
As previous research has shown, the industries which bare the most costs are healthcare ($7.13 billion) and energy ($6.9 billion). These two are often seen as soft targets, and which have high amounts of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII):
The highest cost per record relates to consumer PII and is $150 per record breached. When it comes to the motivates for threat actors, it is still the human failing for the love of money that keeps them focused on their targets, but there is a significant percentage associated with hacktivist and nation-states:
For the things that can save costs related to data breaches, the best investment is within Incident Response (IR) testing, business continuity planning and…
