Among the report's key findings:

Slightly more than half of organizations plan to increase security investments as a result of a breach. The top areas identified for additional investments included incident response planning and testing, employee training and threat detection and response technologies.
Extensive security AI and automation has a $1.76 million impact on reducing costs and minimizing time to identify and contain breaches. Organizations that used these capabilities extensively within their approach experienced, on average, a 108-day shorter time to identify and contain the breach.
Only one-third of companies discovered a data breach through their own security teams, highlighting a need for better threat detection. Two-thirds of breaches were reported by a benign third party or by the attackers themselves. When attackers disclosed a breach, it cost organizations nearly $1 million more.
Not involving law enforcement in a ransomware attack costs organization $470,000 more. Although 63% of respondents said they involved law enforcement, the 37% that didn't paid 9.6% more and experienced a 33-day longer breach lifecycle.
Since 2020, health care data breach costs have increased 53.3%. The highly regulated health care industry has seen a considerable rise in data breach costs over that time period. For the 13th year in a row, the health care industry reported the most expensive data breaches, at an average cost of nearly $11 million.
Eighty-two percent of breaches involved data stored in the cloud, whether in public, private or multiple environments. Attackers often gained access to multiple environments, with 39% of breaches spanning multiple environments and incurring a higher-than-average cost of $4.75 million.

The report concluded with four recommendations: Build security into every stage of software development and deployment, and test regularly; modernize data protection across the hybrid cloud; use security AI and automation to increase speed and accuracy; and strengthen resiliency by knowing the attack surface and practicing incident response.

Instant Insights /

Average Cost of Data Breach Climbed to Record $4.45 Million Last Year, Research Finds

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