According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report, the average global breach cost has reached $4.88 million — a significant increase over last year’s $4.45 million and the biggest jump since the pandemic.
For financial industry enterprises, costs are even higher. Companies now spend $6.08 million dealing with data breaches, which is 22% higher than the global average.
Here’s what financial organizations need to know about this year’s Cost of a Data Breach report.
2024 at a glance: Time-consuming and costly
Financial firms had the second highest breach cost of any industry; only healthcare attacks were more expensive. Both healthcare and finance saw the same costs for large-scale breaches: When 50 million records or more were compromised, average costs skyrocketed to $375 million.
Malicious attacks remained the top attack vector in finance, at 51%, but IT failures and human error accounted for one-fourth of all attacks, coming in at 25% and 24%, respectively.
In terms of detection time, financial industry organizations took an average of 168 days to identify and 51 days to contain a breach. While this is lower than the global average of 194 days to identify and 64 days to contain, it’s still a significant period of time.
Consider that 168 days works out to just under six months. That’s six months of attackers infiltrating systems, carrying out reconnaissance and compromising accounts.
Read the report
Tracking data breach trends over time
Simply put, costs are going up.
