Ponemon Institute has carried out the largest study on the cost of data breaches and came to a conclusion that the average total cost of a data breach is $3.62 million and the average number of records in a data breach is 24,089.
The study which was carried out on 17 industries including finance, healthcare, technology, retail, says that companies which have incident response teams can save $19 per record which stands out to $457,691 per breach.
Data Breach study by Ponemon Institute says that companies can save $16/record or $385,000 per breach by having data encryption solutions in their data storage environments.
The 2018 data breach study says that the United States witnessed $8.13 million loss in the current year and so is standing tall on the chart, while Brazil was recorded to be at the lowest with just $2.01 million estimated loss from data breaches.
A detailed list of countries which incurred financial losses due to data breaches is as follows
United States-$8.1 million
Germany-$4.7 million
United Kingdom- $3.7 million
Japan-$3.4 million
South Africa- $2.9 million
Australia- $2.5 million
India-$1.8 million
Brazil- $1.2 million
Ponemon Institute survey which was sponsored by IBM says that the United States was the only nation to spend $1.56 million on post data breach response activities which include establishing help desk, inbound communications, special investigative activities, remediation, legal expenditures, product discounts, identity protection services and regulatory interventions.
Note- the calculation of the components of the cost of data breach depends on the following factors-
• The unexpected and unplanned loss of customers following a data breach.
• Number of records lost or stolen during the incident
• Time taken to identify and contain a data breach
• Detection and escalation of the data breach incident
• Costs associated to recover data which also includes the cost to notify victims
