A quickie on data breach costs. Or rather, one aspect of a data breach cost. When one deals with the costs of a data breach, making assumptions becomes a necessity for the lack of data. Companies are generally not forthcoming when it comes to listing out how much it cost to remediate a particular aspect of a data breach. How much for setting up an emergency toll-free number staffed with operators? How much for sending out notification letters? How much for hard disk encryption like AlertBoot? Certainly, some numbers are bandied about, such as penalties and fines assessed to a company by a regulating body, such as in this case. Sometimes, a company will come out and give an overall cost (in that last link, BCBS of Tennessee ended up spending $10 million in total). Well, I've finally found one statistic that is a bit specific: Two weeks ago hackers broke into the school district's internal network, accessing thousands of Social Security numbers. The district alerted the community about the breach the day it found out about it and negotiated a deal with a credit monitoring company to offer a 50 percent discount on anti-identity-theft services. [kvia.com] There you have it. When it comes to credit monitoring, you can finagle 50% off the listed price. I've often assumed that such a discount could be gotten if the number of affected people is large enough. In the above case, 70,000 people were potential clients. No doubt that agreements for steeper discounts can be gotten if the number of people affected in a breach are higher.
A quickie on data breach costs. Or rather, one aspect of a data breach cost.
When one deals with the costs of a data breach, making assumptions becomes a necessity for the lack of data. Companies are generally not forthcoming when it comes to listing out how much it cost to remediate a particular aspect of a data breach. How much for setting up an emergency toll-free number staffed with operators? How much for sending out notification letters? How much for hard disk encryption like AlertBoot?
Certainly, some numbers are bandied about, such as penalties and fines assessed to a company by a regulating body, such as in this case. Sometimes, a company will come out and give an overall cost (in that last link, BCBS of Tennessee ended up spending $10 million in total).
Well, I've finally found one statistic that is a bit specific:
Two weeks ago hackers broke into the school district's internal network, accessing thousands of Social Security numbers. The district alerted the community about the breach the day it found out about it and negotiated a deal with a credit monitoring company to offer a 50 percent discount on anti-identity-theft services. [kvia.com]
There you have it. When it comes to credit monitoring, you can finagle 50% off the listed price. I've often assumed that such a discount could be gotten if the number of affected people is large enough. In the above case, 70,000 people were potential clients. No doubt that agreements for steeper discounts can be gotten if the number of people affected in a breach are higher.
Related Articles and Sites:http://www.databreaches.net/?p=20540http://www.kvia.com/news/29176821/detail.html