The average budget required to recover from a security breach is $551,000 USD for enterprises, and $38,000 for small and medium businesses according to Kaspersky Lab. Based on a worldwide survey of 5,500 companies conducted in cooperation with B2B International, the survey concluded the most expensive types of security breach are employee fraud, cyber-espionage, network intrusion and the failure of third party suppliers. Nine out of ten companies that took part in the survey reported at least one security incident, but not all were serious and/or lead to the loss of sensitive data. Results show most frequently breaches were the result of a malware attack, phishing, leaks of data by employees and vulnerable software which had been exploited. Cost estimations provide a new perspective on the severity of IT security incidents and the findings show the outlook for SMBs and enterprises is slightly different. Large companies pay significantly more when a security breach is the result of a trusted third party failure. Other expensive types of breaches include fraud by employees, cyber-espionage and network intrusion.
