We all know security breaches are costly, but just how much?
New figures released by Kaspersky Lab on the budget required to recover from such a breach are oddly specific: $551,000 for enterprises and $38,000 for small businesses.
“Those costs include professional services (IT, risk management, lawyers), lost business opportunities and downtime,” the report said.
Reputational damage can also increase this figure by up to $204,750 for an enterprise and up to $8,653 for a small business.
According to Kaspersky, it surveyed some 5,500 companies, of whom a whopping 90 per cent said they had at least one breach, with 46 per cent losing sensitive data. Despite this, 44 per cent of businesses have not implemented anti-malware solutions.
The report does, however, put the cost of prevention into perspective as well. It said that for an enterprise, IT infrastructure upgrades, staffing and training would cost up to $69,000 while for a small business it would cost up to $8,000. To put it into perspective, that is 13 and 21 per cent of the respective recovery budgets mentioned earlier.