The price of recovering from a data breach is steadily climbing — from $9 million in 2012 to $11.6 million last year, to $12.7 million today, Chain Store Age reported on Tuesday (Dec. 30).
According to a report from authentication technology provider Duo Security and the Ponemon Institute, during 2014 the costs of recovering from individual breaches ranged from a low of $1.6 million to a high of $61 million.
Data breaches were relatively inexpensive for businesses in hospitality ($5.9 million), health care ($6 million) and consumer products ($6.8 million), compared with much heftier costs for breaches in financial services ($20.8 million), defense ($21.9) and energy and utilities ($26.5 million).
All the companies studied saw attacks from viruses, worms and Trojans. Other common cyberattack types include malware (94 percent), botnets (76 percent), Web-based attacks (64 percent), phishing and social engineering (44 percent), malicious insiders (41 percent) and stolen devices (37 percent).
Breach recovery takes an average of 45 days at a cost of $35,414 per day, with the expense split among direct labor (26 percent) cash outlay (22 percent), productivity loss (21 percent), overhead (15 percent) and indirect labor (14 percent).
