Avoid large data breaches - if you can

What happens after a data breach? Is the data recovered, or does it stay lost? Do lawsuits typically follow a breach? These statistics aren't widely known, but we can find reasonable estimates for them by looking at the a database of almost 2,000 data breaches that's available at datalossdb.org.

It turns out that the lost data is only recovered about 5 percent of the time. Usually, it's never seen again.

Oddly enough, lawsuits are even rarer, and only happen about 3 percent of the time.

For larger breaches, these statistics are quite different.

For data breaches that expose 1 million records or more, the data is recovered about 18 percent of the time and lawsuits happen 68 percent of the time.

Avoid those big breaches if you can.