Among the report's key findings:

Slightly more than half of organizations plan to increase security investments as a result of a breach. The top areas identified for additional investments include incident response planning and testing, employee training, and threat detection and response technologies.
Extensive security artificial intelligence (AI) and automation have reduced costs by $1.76 million and minimized time to identify and contain breaches. Organizations that used these capabilities extensively in 2023 identified and contained any breaches they experienced much faster—in 108 days less time, on average.
Only one-third of companies discovered a data breach through their own security teams, highlighting a need for better threat detection. Two-thirds of breaches were reported by a benign third party or by the attackers themselves. When attackers disclosed a breach, organizations spent nearly $1 million more to mitigate the effects of the attack.
Not involving law enforcement in a ransomware attack costs organization $470,000 more. Although 63 percent of respondents said they involved law enforcement in their incident, the 37 percent that didn't paid 9.6 percent more and experienced a 33-day longer breach lifecycle.
Since 2020, healthcare data breach costs have increased by 53.3 percent. The highly regulated healthcare industry has seen a considerable rise in data breach costs over that time period. For the 13th year in a row, the healthcare industry reported the most expensive data breaches, at an average cost of nearly $11 million.
Eighty-two percent of breaches involved data stored in the cloud, whether in public, private, or multiple environments. Attackers often gained access to multiple environments, with 39 percent of breaches spanning multiple environments and incurring a higher-than-average cost of $4.75 million.

The report concludes with four recommendations:

Build security into every stage of software development and deployment, and test regularly;
Modernize data protection across the hybrid cloud;
Use security AI and automation to increase speed and accuracy; and
Strengthen resiliency by knowing the attack surface and practicing incident response.

From: BenefitsPRO

Instant Insights /

Average Cost of Data Breach Climbed to Record $4.45 Million Last Year

Related Stories

Recommended For You