News & Analysis

Data Breach Costs At All-time High

At a time when inflationary pressures are ruling the roost, even data breaches have been taking a big toll on corporate spending

A new report from IBM suggests that the average cost of data breach is now at an all-time high of $4.45 million. However, what is even more intriguing is that  barely half of the organizations breached are planning to increase their security budgets to help cut down the growing risk of data breaches in their enterprises. 

Costs of dealing with security breaches are rising continuously with the cloud being a big target. Close to 40% of all data breaches spanning multiple clouds have resulted in average costs going up to $4.75 million, says the 2023 IBM Cost of Data Breach report. Among the industries, healthcare had the most instances of data breaches with an average cost of $10.94 million. 

The report noted that enterprises were incurring around $3.93 million as cost for breaches with identification and containment times being below 200 days. As for cases where the threshold for finding and fixing went beyond 200 days, the costs touched $4.95 million, says the report while highlighting the importance of artificial intelligence to reduce detection time and costs. 

Use of AI for security detection is helping

IBM notes in the report that the breach lifecycles in companies that used artificial intelligence-led automation for detection lasted 214 days while those that went with traditional methods endured a longer period of 322 days. John Dwyer, head of research at IBM X-Force says while several findings reinforced earlier beliefs, a few were surprising. 

In fact, it is no more enough to just raise the flag with the IT department when security breaches are found. There is a need to call in the police and one of the surprise findings of the report was the impact that involving law enforcement had on security, says a report published by SDxCentral quoting the IBM official. 

Including law enforcement cuts down costs

The involvement of law officers actually helped ransomware victims by saving them $470K in breach costs. In addition, their investigations further helped reduce up to 30 days off the overall breach timelines on an average. Dwyer hoped that these findings dispel the misconception that getting the police involved actually increases costs or lengthens the time involved. In fact, about 40% of the respondents to IBM’s survey said they did not involve the police. 

Another surprising factor that was brought out by the report is that less than a third of all the breaches reviewed actually got detected by the company’s internal security team. Most of them were disclosed by a third party such as the police, security researchers or business partners. IBM also noted that enterprises should have a robust security detection capability in-house. 

Need an outside-in approach to security too

Companies that are looking at the processes and system from an outside-in perspective could be better equipped to identify the attack, the report said, adding that 15% of the breaches they studied actually originated from a business partner, while 27% were disclosed by the attackers themselves, which proved to be the costliest and the toughest to contain. 

The report noted the need for improvement in terms of detection and response but also said that organizations must take a practical approach to do so. While the threat landscape continues to increase in terms of number of attacks, the main goals and objectives of the attacker have not changed all that much, the study noted. 

Include security right from the word go

Every company needs to conduct a threat analysis around their data sets and implement a detection and response strategy that is directly connected to the goals and objectives of prospective attackers. This would reduce the risk of costly data breaches, the report says, adding that working with an incident response team and a plan may help. 

Finally, the report proffered the idea of using the DevSecOps approach to reduce the cost of data breaches, which could be as high as $1.7 million less than companies that either have a low level or do not use this approach at all. The idea is to bake in secure development practices into the entire software development lifecycle. 

In the past, security was considered an add-on feature after the process of development, which caused costly vulnerabilities. By including security at every step through ensuring that this team becomes a direct stakeholder of the development process, enterprises can come up with efficient and effective software without compromising on vulnerabilities. 

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