F5 Labs Security Incident

Strategies Breach Costs Are Rising with the Prevalence of Lawsuits When it comes to tallying the total cost of a data breach, lawsuits figure prominently, alongside repair costs, loss of reputation and sales, compliance penalties, and operational downtime. By Raymond Pompon May 02, 2018 8 min. read In our forthcoming report on protecting applications, we commissioned Ponemon to conduct a large global survey of security professionals about application security. One question we asked was about the estimated financial impact of a cyber-attack that resulted in the leakage of personally identifiable information (PII) about customers, consumers, or employees. Of the 3,135 responses we received, the most popular range chosen by 24% of respondents was $500,001 to $1,000,000. Ponemon extrapolated the future value of breaches at $6.56 million. This doesnt take into account company size, or the count of breached records, two elements that are the biggest factors in breach costs. Based on the settlement costs we profile in this article, which do not cover the organizations breach remediation costs, compliance fines, or legal fees, we believe organizations are drastically under estimating their true breach costs. Figure 1: Cost of confidential data breach - F5 Ponemon security survey Figure 1: Cost of confidential data breach - F5 Ponemon security survey What do breach costs consist of? They can include anything from incident response investigation costs, remediation costs, reputation damage, loss of sales, operational downtime, and compliance penalties. Another significant cost that hasnt historically been a major contributor to breach costs but is now becoming more and more frequent, is lawsuits . We decided to get some hard numbers to compare to our survey responses. Lawsuit settlements for large data breaches are public knowledge, so we compiled this review of data breach lawsuits resulting from cyber-attacks. Class Action Lawsuits The most common source of monetary...

... (truncated for display)