With the average cost of a data breach increasing by about 23 percent over the past two years, according to an IBM sponsored study conducted by Ponemon Institute out of Michigan, we are beginning to see a rise in data breach cleanup businesses. From hospital ransomware to retailers’ POS devises and even the theft of millions of employee fingerprints, companies do not know how to properly protect themselves from cyber-attacks. This can end up costing them big bucks in the long run from the cleanup costs, which include things like remediation specialists, attorney fees and PR. Not to mention that the companies effected risk damaging their reputations with clients.
The best way you can lower the costs of recovering from a date breach is to make sure that you have taken the necessary precautionary steps to prevent any attacks in the first place. Melissa Ventrone, a partner at the Chicago law firm Thompson Coburn insists that “Endpoint monitoring, anti-virus and anti-malware, and central logging points should be in place prior to an event.”
Is a data breach the end of the world? While they can be extremely inconvenient and costly for a company, a study performed by the Rand Corp. of Santa Monica, California found that 12 months following a breach, only 11 percent of those affected by the breach stopped doing business with the company involved. This is because in some cases those effected have no other choice but to stay where they are, or that while something like their fingerprint may have been stolen, they are virtually unaffected by it.