The Soaring Cost of a Data Breach
Businesses Are Passing On Record Data Breach Costs to Their Customers
No IT professional wants to face the prospect of navigating a business data breach. Unfortunately, many find themselves in exactly that position. A data breach is a costly affair for any company, and that bill only gets bigger if the incident has complications like being caused by a remote worker or if it is ransomware-related.
The top finding in this year’s report isn’t anything that IT professionals wanted to hear. Once again, the cost of a data breach has gone up, reaching $4.35 million this year, an increase of 2.6% from the 2021 cost of $4.2 million per incident, which was at the time the highest ever recorded in the 17 years of the study.
Most Organizations Have Weathered a Data Breach and Then Raised Their Prices
Unfortunately, an increasingly larger share of organizations are paying the price of a data breach these days too. The vast majority of IT professionals say that their organization is likely to have a data breach within one year. Making matters worse, for more than three-quarters of organizations in the survey, that won’t be their first trip down that road. Analysts estimate that more than 80% of companies have experienced more than one data breach incident already. Only 17% of the organizations that these researchers surveyed experienced their first data breach within the survey period. This finding makes it clear that every business is facing the prospect of a data breach, and the situation is less of an “if” than a “when”.
Researchers also discovered that the majority of companies that experienced a data breach raised their prices because of the incident. In today’s lean economic times, companies can’t afford to absorb the giant budget blow that a data breach delivers.
Where In the World is a Data Breach Most Expensive?
Geography is also a factor in data breach cost. Many things that vary from region to region drive the price up or down like available skilled workers, productivity, currency valuation or seasonal complications. Unsurprisingly, the U.S held on to the top spot for data breach cost for the 12th consecutive year, with an average data breach cost of $9.44 million. That’s a 4.3% increase from the $9.05 million a data breach cost in the U.S. in 2021. Also like last year, the Middle East region had the second highest average total cost of a data breach, increasing from $ 6.93 million in 2021 to $7.46 million in 2022, a change of 7.6%.
The Top 5 Countries or Regions with the Highest Data Breach Cost
- The United States = $9.44 million
- The Middle East = $7.46 million
- Canada = $5.64 million
- The United Kingdom = $5.05 million
- Germany = $4.85 million
Reduce the Risk of a Data Breach with Powerhouse Solutions
Security Awareness Training
CISA recently recommended that companies step up their security awareness training programs to combat the current flood of ransomware threats. It’s the right move to make – Venture Beat reports that 84% of businesses in a recent survey said that security awareness training has reduced their phishing failure rates, making their employees better at spotting and stopping phishing, the gateway to most of today’s nastiest cyber threats.
Watch Out for Dark Web Danger
Cybercriminals can do a lot with a compromised credential, like steal data and deploy ransomware. Compromised credentials are easy to obtain on the dark web and they open so many doors. An estimated 60% of data breaches involved the improper use of credentials in 2021.
The report makes one thing very clear: the cost of a data breach is continuing to rise, contributing to higher prices for everyone. contact real tech experts Contact us today or book a discovery session!