Costs of IT Security Policy Breaches
In the latest survey, the DTI reported:
"The average reported cost of security breaches is £7146. However, the qualitative follow-up case studies conducted by the NCC showed that the reported costs tended to be only the direct costs of reinstating the service. Replacing lost data or work for example was generally ignored. When the total costs were calculated these were on average three times the reported costs". Security Breaches Survey 1998 Published by the DTI, NCC & ITSEC
According to the previous Security Breaches survey, the average costs of IT security breaches per breach in 1996 were:
- Fraud £132,900
- Copyright breach £71,000
- Illegal access £14,400
- Viruses £4,190
- Malicious damage £3,070
Security Breaches Survey 1996 Published by the DTI, NCC & ITSEC
Of particular note is that viruses are considerably less significant, in terms of financial loss, than fraud, copyright breach or illegal access. The implication here is that virus protection software, while well understood and supported at all levels of management (due mainly to popularisation through the media), will provide no protection whatever against the most damaging and costly types of incident involving software security. We mention this because, by a strange coincidence, Reflex Disknet does.
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