UK authorities have fined Sony PlayStation with a fine of $400,000 on the charges of breaching passwords of several users in the year 2011. But, Sony since the induction of the fine has been facing losses/expenditures far greater than $400,000. According to them, only the insurance of their systems and staff costs $171M which has become difficult to cover because of a loss in their brand image. Prove of this, is the demise in their stock prices which has dropped down over a 60% since the taken has taken place i.e. dropping from $30 to $17.
Attack on Sony’s databases was a gigantic one; it exposed nearly 77 million records. A survey from Symantec exposed an in- depth study regarding what losses a brand has to bear if it attacks the user record’s database. Here are some of the shocking findings of the survey:
* On an average, an attack cost $55, 00,000 to the brand.
* At least, $3 million losses arise from the loss of brand image.
* A total of 28,349 records are breached in a single record.
* The cost to notify users regarding the breaches has become really high, especially, due to the new regulations implemented in EU.
Same stuff could be laid down to Sony; it has been facing these above mentioned circumstances since the imposition of the fine. The cost of notifying every single individual for Sony has been difficult to cope. Especially, due to the new regulations applied in U.S. Still, there has been 45 states where there has been no notification regarding the attacks and databases.
Samsung official while asked to explain all this stuff, but, weren’t able to defend the security flaws. The commissioner investigating on this case said:
“There’s no disguising that this is a business that should have known better. [Sony]…trades on its technical expertise, and … had access to both the technical knowledge and the resources to keep this information safe.”
However, according to the recent statistics there has been considerable decrease in the amount of breaches especially comparing it to the intensity of 2012. The main reason behind this is the increase in the investment made by the brands. According to a source on web, “there has been a drop of $7.2M per breach to what it was in 2012. As more attackers are leveraging the power of the cloud for scaled attacks, more companies are fighting back with cloud security”.
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