Data Breach Costs $2m Per Incident

One of the first comprehensive local surveys of data breach costs shows organisations sustained financial losses of almost $2 million on average per incident, with an average $123 spent to deal with each compromised record. The 2009 Australian Cost of a Data Breach study, conducted by US-based Ponemon Institute on behalf of data encryption specialist PGP, examined the actual financial losses incurred by 16 organisations from different industry sectors following a data loss, with breaches ranging from around 3300 to 65,000 lost or stolen records. In the most expensive incident, one organisation spent more than $4m to resolve a single event