Cyberattacks grow every year in sophistication and frequency, and the cost of data breaches continues to rise with them. A new report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the 2024 Cost of Data Breach Study, details the financial impacts of attacks across multiple industries.
The global average cost of a data breach reached an all-time high of $4.45 million in 2023, which is a 15% increase over the past three years. This increase was mainly driven by rising expenses associated with lost business and post-breach response actions, according to the report. The United States exceeded all other nations in the highest average cost per breach at $9.48 million.
As in past years, the healthcare industry suffered the highest average breach costs at $10.93 million, followed by the financial sector at $5.9 million. Healthcare data breaches typically last 213 days before discovery, more than the average of 194 days across other industries.
Recent years have also shown a troubling new trend: the rise of very large breaches involving millions of records.
Unique challenges, significantly higher costs
Over the past decade, healthcare has consistently been one of the most expensive industries for data breaches, with costs significantly higher than the global average. But the costs have grown across industries. In 2014, for example, the average total cost of breaches was $3.5 million.
Regulations governing data handling in healthcare, including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) and even GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), also contribute to the industry’s high average cost of data breaches.
The study also addressed th ..
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