Antivirus would have saved these businesses $71 billion in 2019

Several businesses ranging from tech to healthcare could save about $71 billion in 2019.

Data gathered and calculated by Precisecurity.com shows that Adobe, Facebook, First American Corporation, Health Sciences Authority, Ministry of Health (Singapore), and Quest Diagnostics could have saved the amount if they had proper antivirus solutions in place.

28% of data breaches involve malware, according to Verizon.

Precisesecurity.com argues that with a good antivirus solution some businesses could avoid data leaks, considering it would immunise computers against unauthorised code or software.

Antivirus also protects computer systems by detecting real-time threats to ensure the data is safe.

Malware usually affects computer systems in various ways, including self-replication to overloading the system, creating a backdoor for hackers, or file encryption.

Using a proper antivirus could help protect systems against these malware attacks.

In total, all records leaked due to poor security were worth $256 billion, since each record leak in 2019 was worth around $150, according to IBM Security.

From the data, 28% of the breaches include malware, meaning about $71 billion could be saved if an effective antivirus solution was in place.

Over the years, each exposed record has had different financial consequences on businesses. For example in 2014, each exposed record accounted for a $145 loss.

In 2015, there was a rise in the cost per record at $154. Over the last five years, the highest figure was recorded in 2016 at $158 while 2017 saw a sharp decline to $141.

In 2018 and 2019 each exposed record was worth $148 and $150 respectively.

The poor security led to the exposure of 1.7 billion records in 2019.

Adobe had 7,500 records exposed. In this incident, anyone with a web browser could access the leaked information which included email addresses, account creation date, Adobe products used among others.

Facebook suffered two breaches in 2019 due to poor security totalling in 807 million leaked records, including names, phone numbers, and Facebook user IDs.

First American Corporation saw 885 million records exposed. The firm lost data on bank account details, social security numbers, wire transactions, and other mortgage paperwork.

Health Sciences Authority (Singapore) saw 808,000 records exposed to unauthorised personnel. The breach, which was linked to a vendor, affected blood donors records stored by the entity.

Singapore's Ministry of Health witnessed the exposure of 14,200 involving the country's human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) registry.

And clinical laboratory service provider Quest Diagnostics had about 11.9 million records exposed. The exposure occurred when an unauthorised user had access to personal information through a third-party billing collections vendor.

To compare, even by using $15 as the worth per each exposed record, the damage for business would still be at about $7.1 billion in 2019.