Will HMRC breach cost £625 million?

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However, as people have no choice but to use the tax body, costs associated with lost business can be ignored. At a cost of £1 each notification, that's already a £25 million bill; add in detection and post-incident security improvements, and the bill could hit £625 million.

Bunker warned that costs could be long-term, too. "If you were to discover the two discs in five or ten years time, the majority of bank accounts would still be valid," he said.

HMRC and Standard Life: £825,000

The loss of a disc containing 15,000 pensioners' details hit both HMRC and Standard Life. Breaches hitting financial firms cost more, some £55 per record, making this incident worth some £825,000, according to the study figures.

Marks and Spencer: £1.5 million

A contractor lost a laptop with 26,000 records from the high street icon. As third-party losses hit harder, the study suggests M&S can expect to pay £59 per record for the 26,000 which went missing - a total cost of £1.5 million.

Nationwide: £605 million

The loss of 11 million records by the building society led to a £980,000 fine. In addition to that, however, at a rate of £55 per record, the firm can expect to see a business hit of some £605 million in lost business, security upgrades and other costs, the study suggests.

Skipton Financial Services: £770,000

The financial firm was recently told off by the Information Commissioner's Office for losing a laptop, but escaped the massive fine which hit Nationwide. Still, at the rates described in the Ponemon report, the 14,000 lost records cost the firm some £55 each - a grand total of £770,000.

Whether these costs are realistic or not is impossible to tell without inside information and a strong audit trail, but such frightening numbers could help push businesses to take data security seriously. McAfee's Day said: "Over the last year, they are very much seeing the realities of this because of the number of disclosures we've had."

Hopefully, such high numbers of incidents and costs could mean organisations move to take the issue seriously. "People dealing with this information should look after it as if it were their own," Symantec's Bunker said. "The costs associated with the solutions are significantly less than the cost of dealing with a data loss."

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