Sony hack could cost Sony $318 per account!?

[Baalzamon]

walkerj said:

Of course this isn't true! God I don't know why people bothr with these stupid proedictions. The average cost of a data breach was 318 dollars. Per BREACH not per USER. Most breaches like this don't cost anyone money. The credit company tends to swallow individual claims. Ex. Someone steals your card and buys something from newegg.com. You complain to the credit company, they reemberse you and usually issue a new card. Newegg has your money, but the credit company pays you back.  And this only applies to the people who are actually victims of credit theft, which currently ammounts to 0 people. The biggest cost for Sony will be PR and how ever many millions they are paying this private security firm.  

There is no user to breach ratio that can be applied here. Imagine most security breached include a hundred people. Now imagine the cost of the break is $31,800. That is 318 dollars per person. Now imagine the breach involves 1500 people. The cost is still going to be $31,800 to fix the problem. The price of fixing broken security doesn't magically increase based on user accounts.

 

If K-mart is compromised and 100 peoples info goes out there it costs them the same as if 1,000 peoples info gets out there. They don't absorb the cost of reimbersement, and Sony definitely doesn't. This stuff was obtained from a hacked PS3 with a custom firmware and a hackers program.

Unless security firm Alpha charges 23 billion per review, then this report is absolute trash.

I was thinking about that, but I'm pretty sure this is technically 77 million malicious acts, because you are doing it to 77 million accounts, just like if you murdered 3 people, you would be tried for 3 acts of murder, not 1 (probably a dumb analogy, but it makes sense to me.)

Don't get me wrong though, I have serious doubts this will cost Sony even $1 billion.  Actually, I find it hard to believe it will cost them anything even close to that much, even if all lost revenue is seen as a cost.