Cybersecurity: Costs for Responding to Security Breaches Spikes

As the waves of cyber breaches continue to grow in strength, the associated costs of trying to defend against them and the costs of cleaning up after a breach occurs are continuing to grow.

Responding to security breaches are expensive.  Once a business has been hit with a breach, a recent study by Ponemon and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, the average cost in remedying the incident is now $1.6 million.  The average annual costs involved in responding to the security fallout for businesses has spiked upwards over the last year to reach $12.7 million.  T

Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said that “business disruption, information loss and the time it takes to detect a breach collectively represented the highest cost to organisations experiencing a breach.”

The number of attacks occurring are rapidly growing.  Over the last year, there has been an increase of more than 175 percent in the the number of cyber attacks.  Ponemon estimates that every week in the US there are 138 successful break-ins.  This compares with 2010 which saw an average of 50 attacks per week.  But what’s worse is that many of the break-ins go undetected for long periods of time.  On average, it takes 170 days before a company even knows that a breach has occurred.  Once detected, businesses are averaging 45 days to respond to and ‘resolve’ the incident, although often it is difficult or impossible to know the exact extent that information may have been compromised.

Sean Mason, global incident response leader at CSC, said that to bring in an incident response team that isn’t on retainer, it could cost up to $400 per hour, “especially if you’re behind the eight ball and under the gun.”

Art Gilliland, Senior Vice President and general manager of Enterprise Security Products at HP, said that “adversaries only need to be successful once to gain access to your data, while their targets must be successful every time to stop the barrage of attacks their organizations face each day.  No amount of investment can completely protect organizations from highly sophisticated cyber attacks, but improving and prioritizing your organization’s ability to disrupt the adversary with actionable  intelligence solutions such as SIEM, can significantly improve attack containment and reduce the overall financial impact.”