IBM Study: Costs Associated with Security Breach on the Rise
Hikvision Tips to Reduce Security Concerns
The SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) article, “Study shows data breach costs on the rise, financial impact felt for years,” outlines results from the IBM Security “Cost of a Data Breach Report” about security concerns and costs arising from a breach.
Backed by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the study interviewed more than 500 worldwide organizations that experienced a security breach over the past year. It also analyzed costs across factors such as legal, regulatory and technical activities, in addition to customer impact and employee productivity, according to the article.
The report found that the average cost of data security breach is now $3.92 million, a 12 percent increase over the previous five years. Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) with fewer than 500 employees had an average cost per breach of $2.5 million.
"Cybercrime represents big money for cybercriminals, and unfortunately that equates to significant losses for businesses. With organizations facing the loss or theft of over 11.7 billion records in the past three years alone, companies need to be aware of the full financial impact that a data [security] breach can have on their bottom line—and focus on how they can reduce these costs,” said Wendi Whitmore, global lead for IBM X-Force Incident Response, in the article.
SIW outlined top report findings, including:
- More than 50 percent of security breaches were the result of a malicious cyberattack and cost $1 million more (on average) than breaches arising from accidental sources.
- Security breaches that affected more than 1 million records per incident, called Mega Breaches, cost companies a projected $42 million. Those involving 50 million records cost $388 million.
- Healthcare organizations had the highest cost of breach at an average cost of $6.5 million per incident.
Malicious security breach incidents grew 21 percent over six years. The article noted that accidental breaches due to system glitches or human error were responsible for 49 percent of security breaches covered in the report. “These breaches from human and machine error represent an opportunity for improvement, which can be addressed through security awareness training for staff, technology investments, and testing services to identify accidental breaches early on,” said the report.
Read more here.
Hikvision Tips to Reduce Security Concerns
ikvision provides security tips in this blog, “Hikvision Cybersecurity Director Offers Tips to Reduce Cyberattacks and Security Concerns in Network Security, User Security and System Administration.” In the article Chuck Davis advocates for defense in depth, an approach that uses diverse strategies to manage risk.
From the blog: “It’s based on the idea that multiple layers of defense will provide additional protection against a potential cyberattack. This includes network segmentation, which simply stated means splitting a network into separate networks that are isolated, not connected, and compromising one won’t compromise the others. For example, finance, human resources and security should each have dedicated networks. This is the way corporate networks are built, which is based on the principle of least privilege—this means only giving people or systems access to the resources that they need, and nothing more. This is effective for the obvious reason of keeping sensitive resources only accessible by those who need access, but it is also an effective means of compartmentalizing a network environment in case of cyberattack or malware infection.”
For additional cybersecurity tips, check out our catalog of cyber blog topics.