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

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]." Posted in: Account Takeover Identity Theft