Number of Stolen Sensitive Records





While the number of data breaches in 2009 fell, the average cost per incident rose to $6.75 million, from $6.65 million in 2008, according to the Ponemon Institute.

The average costs of data breaches increased by about 1.0 percent to $204 per record in 2009, up from $202 per record in 2008, and $197 per record in 2007.

The costs of breaches from the Ponemon Institute study ranged from $750,000 on the low end up to a very expensive $31 million at the high end.

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
  7. CEO in the hot seat

So, if a typical company has say, 31,000 database records that are stolen with today's breach cost of $204 per record, they would be looking at a cost of $6,324,000 !!