## 4 Economy of Scale  
Since the cost per record is misleading when it comes to estimating the data breach cost, the economy of scale concept will assist in making the cost per record consistent with other factors instead of the constant cost per record that is obtained by dividing the total \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Partial Costs** & **Avg. Cost per Record for CC** & **Avg. Cost per Record for** \\  & **(USD)** & **PHI and SSN (USD)** \\ \hline Incident investigation & 1.15 & 1.64 \\ Crisis management & 3.52 & 4.57 \\ Sanctions & 0.81 & 0.81 \\ Lawsuit & 7.09 & 1.56 \\ Total costs & 12.57 & 8.58 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Average cost/record for two record types in hub international calculator by our analysis. breach cost by the total breach size. Therefore, using the economy of scale is important in order to remove the correlation between the high breach cost and breach size and ensure that the relationship relies not only on the cost per record factor only but also on other factors. For example, cyber-attacks and data breaches decrease profits and affect the global economy. The data breach is one of the fastest-growing crimes and has increased in scale, cost, and sophistication, posing a major threat to both businesses and individuals. Some of the cyberattacks that cost a fortune and affected the global economy include Epsilon, WannaCry and Petya. The current issue is that the total breach cost increases when the size of the data breach increases. To investigate this issue, the concept of economy of scale should be considered for analysis, along with actual data. This concept is defined as a decrease in the average long-term costs resulting from an increase in the size of the operating unit [31]. As is depicted by the data [2; 32], many organizations have disclosed that their business has been affected by data breaches and cybersecurity attacks. These organizations depend on data management which is influenced by the costs of the data breach. Therefore, we present two hypotheses:  
1. The overall cost rises with breach size. 2. For larger breaches, the breach cost per record will decline. Thus, the overall breach cost will rise less than linearly. Although the economy of scale depends on the increasing breach cost, the larger breach may be simplified with cost per record. The cost per affected record declines when the number of affected records (breach size) of the whole data breach is too large because we have to divide the total cost by the number of affected records. According to the concept of economy of scale, the cost of development per unit decreases as the number of records increases. Therefore, the relationship variables are the number of affected records and the cost per record. A residual analysis suggests that the trend appears to change slightly for record sizes greater than about 25,000. This suggests that the model may be amenable to further refinement. Perhaps a piecewise regression may yield better accuracy, which may be addressed in future research. The reason is that the two data collection approaches are different. The Verizon/NetDiligence data are based on insurance payments, while the Ponemon data include more complete costs such as opportunity costs. As the global economy relies more and more on information technology (IT) based on the Internet of Things (IoT), the economy of scale will depend on greater usage of secure connections. With the growing scalability of IoT and emerging technologies such as IoT-based IT, interconnectedness, cybersecurity threats pose an increasing challenge. Figure 3 depicts the relationship between abuse, attack, cybercrime and data breach. According to [33], a data breach is involved with the abuse, attack, and cybercrime (CCr) as shown in Figure 3. Abuse encompasses any negative and/or undesirable use of technology that affects the breaching and cost of the breach. An attack refers to a deliberate  
Figure 3: Relationship among abuse, attack, cybercrime and data breach.