New research from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) released on Wednesday reports that the use of freely available DNS firewalls could prevent 33% of cybersecurity data breaches from occurring. The study also indicates that DNS firewalls might have prevented conservatively $10 billion in data breach losses over from the 11,079 incidents in the past five years. (data showed 3,668 breaches involved at least one of the threat actions which would have been potentially mitigated by a DNS firewall.)

— And there’s more: Report also makes a reference to the spring of 2018 when the Council of Economic Advisors released a report estimating that ‘malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016.’ Also in 2018, McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that global losses from cybercrime are between $445 billion and $600 billion. Hence, researchers point out that since their data shows that a DNS Firewall could play a role in preventing one-third of breaches, “it is likely it could have played a role in one-third of these losses to the extent that they arise from breaches and not denial-of-service or other non-breach attacks.” That would be additional prevention of $19 and $37 billion in the U.S. or globally between $150 and $200 billion.

— Advice for individuals: It is worth using a DNS firewall, says Global Cyber Alliance. GCA in collaboration with IBM and the Packet Clearing House in 2017 launched Quad9, a free DNS security service that blocks known malicious domains, preventing computers and IoT devices from connecting to malware or phishing sites.