Number of Stolen Sensitive Records





The costs of data breaches rose to $7.2 million per incident in 2010, up from $6.8 million in 2009, according to the Ponemon Institute.

The average cost per compromised record increased about 5 percent to $214 per record, up from $204 per record in 2009, and $202 per record in 2008.

"Malicious or criminal attacks" where the cause of 31% of breaches in the study, up from 24% in 2009.

These tidy little sums are an aggregate of:

  1. Loss of customers
  2. Legal fees
  3. Compliance (or lack thereof) fines
  4. Non-productive IT staff (they're too busy putting out the fire to do much of anything else)
  5. Computing service downtime
  6. Disastrous PR

So, if a typical company has say, 31,000 database records that are stolen with today's breach cost of $214 per record, they would be looking at a cost of $6,634,000 !!

Ponemon Institute