ReadWriteEnterprise

For the first time in seven years, both the organizational cost of data breach and the cost per lost or stolen record have declined. The organizational cost has declined from $7.2 million to $5.5 million and the cost per record has declined from $214 to $194. These according to the latest Ponemon study for Symantec that was released today. The study also found organizations which employ a chief information security officer who has enterprise-wide responsibility for data protection can reduce the cost of a data breach by 35 percent per compromised record. That is a decent ROI and good news all around.

Do you have users who have more rights to network resources than they should have? Chances are the answer is yes. A new study from Ponemon and sponsored by HP along with another paper sponsored by Symantec point out the old security saw that the threat from within is still real and still a big deal. Maybe it is time this holiday season to finally clean up your network's access rights.

These privileged users, as Ponemon calls them, include database administrators, network engineers, IT security practitioners and cloud custodians. (Now there is a job title that brings up all sorts of interesting imagery.) A majority of them "will look at an organization's most confidential information out of curiosity," not because they are trying to do anything nefarious with this information.