I’ve come up against this question many times when talking to vendors. It seems like if a vendor is selling some sort of backup and archiving product, then they say it is an important part of security — if they don’t have a backup/archive product as part of their portfolio, they shrug it off and say it is NOT part of security but rather just another aspect of network administration. This is where genuine security concerns border on marketing and hype.

But there are some cases where exploits can cause data loss and hard drive crashes, so that’s where the issue definitely falls under the security umbrella. A new study however has discovered that this is actually pretty rare:

A new university study suggests that hard-drive-killing attacks launched by hackers are actually pretty rare — but when they do occur, they can be more costly than most companies think.

The study, published last quarter by professors at the University of Pepperdine and commissioned by data recovery vendor Deepspar Technologies, looks at the causes of hard drive failure and offers insights on just how “fatal” a fatal drive error can be.

Aside from physical theft, hard drive failure is the most common cause of data loss on PCs, the study says, accounting for 38 percent of data loss incidents. In about 30 percent of these cases, the loss of access is the result of drive problems, where corruption of the media makes the data unreadable.

Apparently they have estimated the average hard drive loss costs about $2900 in lost data and productivity, assuming some data is recoverable. Read the full story at DarkReading.