You’d think it would be a long, drawn out reason, with lots of calculations and pretty charts.

It’s not.

Per a recent piece in CSO, firms respond slowly to most of these breaches because, in spite of what you might have thought, the costs are relatively low. For an example, the article cited the recent Home Depot credit card debacle. The net cost wound up being around $28 million dollars-which doesn’t seem too small to most of us. Take out a $15 million insurance payment, and Home Depot was really on the hook for about $13 million. Factor how many cards were compromised, and the rough cost per card? About 50 cents. And those millions of dollars that the breach cost them? A very small fraction of their yearly profits. Not near enough to make them flinch, apparently.

Based on that, one has to think that the MO of hackers, and hacker organizations, that perpetrate such breaches, is going to adapt. The Sony hack was not about money, but about the theft of data and intellectual property, as well as purely tormenting those within Sony that were impacted. While there will always be hackers out for their next score, looking to capitalize off of personal data to aid in identity theft and such, if any are looking to hurt the big companies in particular they are going to have to get more creative.

Which means end users will just have to remain ever vigilant.

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