The average cost of a data breach globally has reached a new high of $4.35m. This figure has increased by 13% since 2020, according to IBM.
The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report was compiled from interviews with 550 organisations in 17 countries that were breached between March 2021 and March 2022.
The firm’s report also stated that consumers were suffering disproportionately from these incidents.
The report found that 60% of breached organisations put their prices up following a breach.
The most expensive cause of breach events is phishing. This costs, on average, $4.9m for organisations.
Healthcare remains the sector hit hardest by breach costs – for the 12th year in a row.
There was some insight into zero trust strategies in the report. 80% of organisations in the healthcare sector said that they had no adopted such approaches.
If a ransom is included in the breach, the costs rise significantly, the report found. The average cost of a ransom attack without the ransom payment was $4.5m.
Nearly half (45%) of recorded breaches occurred in the cloud, with those who had not formulated a security strategy or were in the early stages of doing so liable to pay on average $660,000 more than those with a mature cloud security posture.
Breaches seem inevitable though, with 83% of organisations surveyed said that they’d suffered more than one. Luckily, direction and response seems to be getting better.
