Data Breach Costs Surged by 10Pc This Year, IBM Claims

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The company's latest Cost of a Data Breach report found that severe staffing shortages are linked to higher data breach costs, while AI is being used to significantly reduce the average cost of a breach.

[...] The company's latest report found that the global average cost of a data breach from March 2023 to February 2024 was $4.88m, an increase of 10pc compared to the previous year. IBM attributed the cost spike to lost business as a result of a breach, along with post-breach customer and third-party response costs.

The latest Cost of a Data Breach report also shows that the impacts of data breaches are becoming more severe for businesses, as 70pc of breached organisations reported that a breach caused significant or very significant disruptions. The after-effects are also rising, as recovery takes more than 100 days for most of the breached organisations that were able to fully recover.

Nearly half of all breaches involved customer personal identifiable information, which can include tax identification numbers, emails, phone numbers and home addresses. Breaches involving stolen or compromised credentials took the longest to identify and contain of any attack vector, taking an average of 292 days.

Kevin Skapinetz, IBM Security VP of strategy and product design, said businesses are caught in a continuous cycle of breaches, containment and fallout response".

This cycle now often includes investments in strengthening security defences and passing breach expenses on to consumers - making security the new cost of doing business," Skapinetz said.

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