The danger in this is that such emails could end up in the wrong inbox. Many of us have scrambled to recall an errant email seconds after hitting the send button. For Microsoft Exchange users, that works well sometimes. If you are lucky, the wrong address may not exist and you simply get an “undeliverable” message from the other side. But what if that wrong address does exist and your email does contain very sensitive data? Check out this story from The Register:

In mid-August, according to court documents filed in a California federal court, the Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank was asked by a customer to send certain loan documents to a Gmail account belonging to a third party. A bank employee attempted to do so. But a day later, he realized he had sent the documents to the wrong address – along with a file containing confidential information for 1,325 other customers.

After a failed attempt to recall the email, the employee sent a second note to that wrong address, requesting that the confidential email be deleted before it was opened. There was no response, so the bank contacted Google to determine what could be done to ensure that the confidential info remained confidential. According to the court papers, Google would not provide information on the account unless it received a subpoena or “other appropriate legal process.”

So the bank sued.

Such mistakes have cost people their jobs and in some case a little more.

These are the key findings of the study:

• The average value of a lost or stolen laptop is about $49,246 when you factor in the replacement cost, detection, forensics, data breach, lost intellectual property costs, lost productivity, legal and regulatory expenses etc.
• The potential for a data breach occurring makes a lost or stolen laptop costly to the affected company to the tune of about 80 percent.
• Intellectual property loss is the second highest cost component – about 59 percent of the total cost.
• The faster the affected company learns of the loss, the lower the average cost – about $8,950 if the discovery is made the same day of the loss and about $115,849 if it takes more than a week to discover that the laptop was lost or stolen.
• Lost productivity represents about 1 percent of the total cost when employees have downtime due to the loss of the laptop.
• The most senior level personnel do not experience the highest average cost. The average cost of a lost laptop for a senior executive is $28,449 and the highest average cost for  a manager is $60,781 while a director experiences an average cost of about $61,040.
• The average cost of a lost laptop with a full backup is $69,899 and $39,253 when there is no backup.  The argument is that this inverse relationship is because the existence of a backup makes it easier to confirm the loss of sensitive or confidential data.
• There is almost a $20,000 difference between a lost laptop with encryption and one without.
• The services industry has the highest average full cost – about $112,853, followed by the financial services industry – about $71,820, healthcare ($67,873) and pharmaceuticals ($50,393).
• The industries with the lowest average cost per lost laptop are retail ($8,756) consumer products ($2,194) and manufacturing ($2,184).
• The services industry has the highest average data breach cost at $108,699 while the financial services industry has an average data breach cost of $68,862), healthcare ($43,547) and pharmaceuticals ($42,027). Government, retail and manufacturing had the lowest average data breach cost at $12,017, $3,620 and $44 respectively.
• In terms of intellectual property loss, the technology industry had the highest average cost of $18,205 followed by healthcare ($17,999) and communications ($17,818).

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates that since 2005, about 263 million records have been breached. If we take the average recovery cost of $202 per record as estimated by the Ponemon Institute, that means organizations in the United States have lost a whopping $53 Billion in five years thus making misplaced or stolen laptops one of the costliest exposures most companies face.