According to IBM research, the average cost to organizations of a data breach in 2022 rose to $4.35 million. This is the highest average cost of data breaches of all time on an annual basis. There is an increase of 2.6% compared to 2021 and 13% compared to 2020.
T-Mobile agrees to pay $500 million for data breach
Costs passed on to customers
IBM’s annual report includes an analysis of data breaches experienced by 550 organizations from around the world between March 2021 and March 2022. It was stated that these costs are passed on to consumers. More than half of the organizations participating in the survey admitted that they increased the price of their products and services and passed these costs to their customers.
How is the data breach cost calculated?
The cost estimate includes legal fines and lost sales that may occur years later, apart from urgent expenses such as ransoms paid, costs to investigate and contain the data breach. Many of the highest-cost breaches analyzed involve critical infrastructure in the financial services, industry, technology, energy, transportation, communications, health, education and public sectors.
Ransomware attacks stand out
It turned out that 11% of data breaches analyzed by this year’s study were caused by ransomware attacks. Some of the breaches resulted from stolen or shared credentials, and some from phishing attacks.