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Data breaches found to cost $6.6m on average

Elinor Mills CNET News

Published: 02 Feb 2009 08:07 GMT

It costs $6.6m on average when an organisation suffers a data breach, and more than $200 per compromised record, according to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute that's due to be released on Monday.

The report, sponsored by PGP Corp, examined the costs incurred by 43 organisations that experienced a data breach. Breaches ranged as high as 113,000 records and the average total cost per company ranged from more than $613,000 (£430,000) per breach to nearly $32m.

Most of the cost is due to lost business, which averaged nearly $4.6m, the report found.

Forty-four percent of the organisations surveyed reported a breach by a third party, such as a contractor or outsourcer, and more than 88 percent of all cases this year involved incidents resulting from insider negligence, according to the study.

A study by McAfee recently estimated that cybercrime costs corporations $1tn globally each year.

Credit: Data breaches cost $6.6 million on average, survey finds from CNET News