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Security: Human Error and Glitches Result in Costly Data Breaches
Despite the worry of hackers and cyber-espionage, most data breaches are the result of human mistakes, negligence or unexpected system glitches. Larry Ponemon said that “eight years of research on data breach costs has shown employee behavior to be one of the most pressing issues, up 22% since the first survey… While external attackers and their evolving methods pose a great threat to companies, the dangers associated with the insider threat can be equally destructive and insidious… Data breaches normally aren’t typically about bad people. It’s normally about good people making mistakes or business processes that fail.”
The 2013 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis sponsored by Symantec Corp. and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that almost two-third of data breaches in 2012 were the result of human error (35 percent) or system error (29 percent). Although the single highest cause of a breach is the result of a malicious attack (37 percent).
On average, data breaches cost US companies $188 per lost record to remedy, and the total cost per incident averages across companies as $5.4 million. Lost records per data breach in 2012 ranged from 2300 to more than 99000, with the average number being 28,765 records lost.
Tony Busseri, CEO of Route1, told PCWorld that “we have this expectation that because there’s a policy manual and core training, that people are going to execute perfectly. They don’t. We so often focus on the North Koreans or the Chinese or the bad guys, when in reality we create the large majority of breaches ourselves.”
Mike Smart, product manager at Symantec, said that the human factor is the weakest link. “Consequently, training and awareness should be a priority from the offset.” Linda Park, senior product marketing manager at Symantec, said that “your employees can be the biggest risk but also your best defense against data breaches.”
