Average data breach cost rises to $4 million

The average cost of a data breach has jumped 29 percent since 2013, a new report by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute says. This brings the figure up to $4 million per breach.

The number and the severity of these incidents keeps on growing, the two companies said in the report.

There have been, according to the report, 64 percent more reported security incidents in 2015, than the year before. As the complexity of the attack rises, so does the cost. Breaking the numbers down, it was said that a single compromise record costs the company $158. Among highly regulated industries, it costs even more (in healthcare, the cost is now $355 million, $100 million more than three years ago).

The costs of data breaches were fairly high for a number of reasons -- mostly response activities (incident forensics, communications, legal expenditures, regulatory mandates), which account for 59 percent of the cost.

The report also says that the fact that 70 percent of companies don’t even have an incident response plan also adds to the cost.

It was also said that the price varies, depending on how long the companies take to detect it. Breaches under 100 days usually cost $3.23m, while those above the 100-day mark -- $1 million more.

Leveraging a response team can cut the cost significantly, it was said, up to $16 per record, or $400,000 in total, on average.

That is because these teams know exactly what companies need to do once they’ve been compromised, and streamlining the process cuts down the cost.

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