Criteria for Determining the Cost of a Breach
A checklist of considerations for calculating the true cost of an information security breach
By Simone Kaplan
December 09, 2002 — CSO — 1. System downtime. What systems were out of commission and for how long?
2. People downtime. Who was unable to work, and how long were they unproductive?
3. Hardware and software. How much did it cost to replace servers, hard drives, software programs and so on?
4. Consulting fees. If you needed extra firepower while fighting an attack or for a postmortem analysis, how much did you spend on fees and other expenses?
5. Money. How much were the salaries for people affected by the breach? Consider overtime pay or trades that couldn't be made during downtime.
6. Cost of information. What was the value of information
7. Cost of lost business. Did clients take their business elsewhere? Were there opportunity costs
8. Incidentals. How much did you spend on food, lodging and transportation for the people working to fight the breach? Were there additional facilities costs, such as power usage and electricity?
9. Legal costs. What were potential and actual costs of litigating and investigating the incident?
10. Cost to your company's reputation. Did you spend money on a PR campaign to control the damage?
Read more about data protection in CSOonline's Data Protection section.
The challenge of true data protection spans databases, internal and external networks, physical and offsite storage, business partners and more. These resources offer expert perspective from the basics through specific key elements of data protection strategies.
Network security basics
Protection, detection, and reaction—those are the three underlying principles your security program must embody
Computer incident detection, response, forensics
Richard Bejtlich shows how to measure and improve the maturity of your incident response
A few good IT security metrics
Stop counting blocked malware attachments and measure things that can contribute to meaningful change
5 key cloud security trends
Cloud security is evolving rapidly—stay on top of it
IT risk assessment frameworks
How to do end-to-end encryption
How to compare and use enterprise antivirus
Also find sample data protection policies in CSO's tools, templates and policies library
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It looks like four bulletins will be rated critical while the rest are designated as important.
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