Data Breach Costs Surge 28% in India, Reveals IBM Security Report
- ByStartupStory | July 26, 2023
IBM Security’s Cost of a Data Breach Report reveals that the average cost of a data breach in India has reached an all-time high of Rs 17.9 crore in 2023, marking a 28% increase since 2020. The report highlights the significant impact of data breaches on businesses, with detection and escalation costs surging by 45% over the same period, signaling a shift towards more complex breach investigations.
Among the key findings, the report identifies phishing as the most common attack type in India, accounting for nearly 22% of incidents, followed by stolen or compromised credentials at 16%. Social engineering emerged as the costliest root cause of breaches, with associated costs reaching Rs 19.1 crore, closely followed by malicious insider threats at approximately Rs 18.8 crore.
Globally, businesses face challenges in handling the rising cost and frequency of data breaches. The report indicates that 95% of organizations studied have experienced more than one breach, leading to differing approaches to address the issue. While 51% of breached organizations opt to increase security investments, 57% pass the incident costs onto consumers.
In India, 28% of data breaches studied resulted in the loss of data spanning multiple types of environments, including public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises systems. This indicates attackers’ ability to compromise multiple environments while evading detection. Moreover, when breached data was stored across multiple environments, it incurred the highest associated breach costs, amounting to Rs 18.8 crore, and took the longest time to identify and contain, with an average of 327 days.