Average Data Breach Cost = $3.9m Posted by AVCU on 2:50 PM

On Tuesday of this week IBM released a report stating that data breaches cost affected organizations $3.92 million on average worldwide, up 12% from just 5 years ago.  But U.S. companies taken alone, incurred on average $8.19 million per data breach over the same period.

According to the report, just over half of data breaches in the past six years were caused by malicious attacks, while inadvertent breaches – from human error or system glitches – caused 49%. However, companies hit by a malicious attack incurred over $1 million more in losses.

Malicious attacks aren't only more expensive, but they also take an average of 314 days to identify and contain compared to the overall average of 279 days. Two-thirds of a data breach's costs occur within the first year, while 22% occur in the second year.

The report also found that companies that have an incident response team and practice responses to a breach experienced $1.23 million less in data breach-related costs.

Read the report in entirety.