Cost of a breach - redux

More fun news about the cost of breaches. While everything in this economy is on a firesale, seems like the cost of breaches continue to escalate. First McAfee came out with a study that costs to fight and repair data breaches last year were about one trillion dollars! From the report:

McAfee made the projection based on responses to a survey of more than 800 chief information officers in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil, and Dubai.

The respondents estimated that they lost data worth a total of $4.6 billion and spent about $600 million cleaning up after breaches, McAfee said.

I think the numbers are very high - I calculated 14B/year based on extrapolating the number of breaches since 2005 (~250M from attrition.org) with the average cost per breached record (~$200 from Ponemon). But this seems like a larger survey sample size - so I may be wrong.

Hot on the heels of the McAfee survey is the new report from Ponemon - costs are going up, average cost of a breach is $6.6M, and similar interesting numbers..

The bottom line to all this - I think - costs are high and it is better to protect your data than to deal with the breaches and lost business that comes with it.