Economic Costs and Impacts of Business Data Breaches

A data breach is a consequential cybersecurity attack or incident that may bring substantial impacts and losses to organizational and individual victims. Unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information as a result of data breaches has been on the rise. The number of records breached in commercial business organizations has been the highest among all types of victims, which bring various harms and impacts including economic costs and monetary losses to businesses and consumers. It has been a research challenge for the cybersecurity field to establish an adequate and reliable method for measuring the true costs of cybercrimes and data breaches. A comprehensive model for identifying the factors and extent of economic costs of data breaches is essential to accurate measurement of data breach costs and valuable to cybersecurity decisions and investments for data protection. This paper explores the direct and indirect cost factors of data breach and proposes a comprehensive taxonomy of economic cost and impact factors for analyzing business data breaches. This paper uses the case study of the recent data breach at Target to illustrate direct and indirect cost factors in the proposed model.