Cost of enterprise data breach now US$4.2 million

The Covid pandemic has been a golden age for the crooks targeting enterprise systems. Having people work from home has made it harder to contain security incidents.

Writing at ZDNet Charlie Osborne covers the annual IBM cost of a data breach report. It says a typical enterprise data breach costs the victim US$4.2 million per incident.

That’s up 10 per cent on a year earlier.

Typical data breaches are where 1000 to 100,000 records are involved. Higher up the scale, things are much worse. Companies where between 50 and 65 million records are exposed now face an average of US$400 million to resolve the incident.

Healthcare in the data breach frontline

Healthcare has been hit harder than any other sector.

There’s a real problem everywhere with a severe international shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. One report says there are 4 million unfilled security positions around the world. More than half of all large organisations say they don’t have the specialist security workers they need.

Yet that doesn’t meant this would be a good time for someone with tech skills to refocus on security. One of the reasons IBM identified for the security skills shortage is an unwillingness for employers to pay people the asking rate for their expertise. Going by the headline incident cost figures in the IBM report, paying for skills would be the cheaper option.

IBM research estimates that the average data breach now costs upward of $4 million.

Source: Enterprise data breach cost reached record high during COVID-19 pandemic | ZDNet