The Ponemon Institute in a study sponsored by IBM Security found that the global average cost of data breaches has increased by more than six percent from 2017 to 2018 to an average of nearly 3.9 million dollars. The study, 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study, also, for the first time, studied so-called mega breaches whose record losses range from 1-50 million. The study also articulated some of hidden costs to an organization that occur during a data breach and that often are not, when costs reported, tabulated. For example, in the mega breach category, the biggest cost was not related to remediating the actual data breach; rather, the largest expense related to mega breaches was lost business. This is often not included in publicly reported costs which typically report only costs related to legal, recovery costs, regulatory expenses, and customer reparations. The study found, as an example, that with a breach of 50 million records, the total costs could reach more than 350 million dollars.