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During my Master's, security was one of the subjects I took. It started with an equation that related risk (how much you'd lose if something bad happened), the probability of that risk, and the cost of mitigating that risk. The instruction being, one tries to find a mitigation that costs less than the exploitation of the risk. And note here that "cost" does not refer to just money, but could be computational cost, energy consumed, etc.

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For the MS size entities, the risk calculation is way more complicated. The 1:1 between cost of mitigation vs cost of exploitation only applies to opportunistic attacks, really. At the level where APTs get involved, the data / access might be so valuable that they'd gladly outspend blue team's budget by a factor of 10-100.

But wouldn't the value of data be reflect in the cost of exploitation? (By cost of exploitation, I don't mean to say the resources needed to exploit, but what a company would stand to lose if exploited). The values of the variables, sure, can be different. I don't see why the equation has to be.

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