About IncidentCost.com
An independent vendor-neutral reference for the cost of every type of business incident: data breach, ransomware, insider threat, P1 service outage, DDoS attack, supply chain compromise, compliance violation, accidental data loss. Operated by Digital Signet, founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. Built so the budgeting question for incident response retainers, breach response, ransomware containment, and downtime quantification can be answered without an IR-firm sales call.
Why this site exists
Incident cost is one of the most ungovernable budget lines in security operations. The headline is a retainer fee, but the real cost is the per-hour rate when a P1 actually hits, plus forensics, plus legal, plus PR, plus the customer-facing downtime hit, plus regulatory fines, plus the executive time spent in the war room. Most public guidance is published by IR firms selling the retainer or insurers selling the cyber policy. Every meaningful figure is gated behind a sales call.
What is missing from the public surface is a cross-category reference that quantifies every incident type with a defensible band, cites the underlying source, and exposes the math. IBM publishes one slice (data breach). Ponemon publishes another (insider threat). PagerDuty publishes a third (P1 incident cost). Mandiant publishes dwell time. No single site stitches them together so a CISO, a board member, a procurement lead, or a cyber-insurance underwriter can see all of it on one page, with sources.
IncidentCost.com is that page. We do not sell IR services. We do not broker insurance. We do not accept paid placements. The site exists to publish figures that are defensible, sourced, and useful for budget conversations.
Who runs this site
Oliver runs Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio that builds data-led pricing and decision tools using public datasets. After 20 years as a solutions architect and tech lead across media, utilities, satellite, and data, he founded Digital Signet to apply autonomous AI development methodology to real software at scale.
Reach Oliver: [email protected]. Profile: LinkedIn.
About the studio
This site is operated by Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. It is part of a portfolio of consumer cost-reference and calculator sites we run as a live R&D lab for our Signet methodology, an autonomous AI development team that ships real software at scale.
Digital Signet does not sell incident-response retainers, does not run a forensics practice, does not broker cyber insurance, and does not accept paid placements from any IR firm or cyber insurer. Editorial direction is set by Oliver. Drafts are produced via Digital Signet's autonomous AI development methodology and reviewed against the editorial framework before publication.
For consulting enquiries (fractional CTO, AI product strategy, autonomous-dev-team setup), see digitalsignet.com.
What this site covers
Twelve content routes covering cross-category cost reference, per-incident-type cost analysis, industry and company-size segmentation, response economics, and the math behind the figures.
Editorial principles
Related cost references
Sister sites in the Digital Signet portfolio. Each is editorially independent of this site, with its own LAST_VERIFIED date and source list. We cross-link only inside the portfolio; there are no paid affiliate links anywhere on this site.
This site is not affiliated with IBM, Ponemon Institute, Verizon, PagerDuty, Atlassian, Mandiant, CrowdStrike, Kroll, Coveware, or any other named publisher or vendor. All figures are drawn from publicly available primary sources cited in the relevant page methodology.
Contact and corrections
For corrections, methodology questions, or scenarios that do not fit cleanly: [email protected]. We aim to acknowledge correction requests within five business days. Where a correction shifts a published band by 10 percent or more, we roll LAST_VERIFIED_DATE forward across footer, schema, and banners in a single commit so the change is auditable.