According to a recent study conducted among 45 Every week there is atleast one attack on organizations and the cost of these attacks varies from $1 million to $53 million per year, according to a newly published benchmark study of 45 U.S. organizations hit by data breaches.

Background about the study

The study conducted by Ponemon Institute has been titled “The First Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study” (PDF). The average cost of cyber crime for american companies is a loss of $3.8 million a year. Primarily this covers all aspects ranging from detection to investigation to containment and recovery.

Over a course of ‘4′ week period, Ponemon Institute conducted interviews with 45 organizations from various verticals. The people who are handling the data protection vertical and IT practitioners from various organizations were interviewed. These people shared the average volume of threats faced by them everyday.  The number of attacks experienced by these companies in a week were ‘50′ which is higher than one successfull attack per organization.

The second study conducted by Digital Forensics Association is called as “The Leaking Vault” (PDF). The details of this reports are again quite surprising and have also come as a strong eye-opener to all the involved organizations.

It has been found out that among the 2,807 data breaches which were publicly disclosed worldwide during the last five years, the cost to the victim firms was a whopping $139 billion.

Results from the report

Some underlying statistics from the report:

• Nearly half of all of the reported breaches have comefrom a laptop, which was stolen in 95 percent of the cases signifying the important of encryption software.
• Actual hacks accounted for the most stolen records during 2005 to 2009, with 327 million of the 721.9 million covered in the report.
• It was also found out that Web-borne attacks, malicious code, and malicious insiders are the most costly types of attacks
• The costs are as follows:
• Web-based attack – $143,209
• Malicious code – $124,083
• Malicious insiders – $100,300

More than one third of security breaches during the ‘5′ year period exposed Social security numbers clearly indicating that leakages expose SSNs. At the second rank are the credit cards which are exposed 14 percent of the times. At an overall level malware leads the attacks at 25% followed by SQL injection attacks at 24%. The stolen credentials were found out in 16 percent of the cases.

Want to prevent breach?

Have you been affected by data breach? Do you think that your organization is susceptible to a potential security breach? For further information visit our website where you will learn about our encryption software and other security protection methods.

If you use a data security software a theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or sensitive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Study: Cybercrime costs a business $3.8 million a year (macworld.com)
• ArcSight and Ponemon Institute Release First Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study (eon.businesswire.com)

• Previous Entry: Celebrities Suffer in Hell Pizza attack in New Zealand
• Next Entry: Tesco Bank Data Breach & Verizon’s Security Report