Unsecured servers and databases account for 19 percent of incidents with an average cost per incident of $112.93 million, while ransomware accounted for 16 percent of incidents with an average cost per incident of $22.18 million.
That comes from a global report entitled “The Cost of a Data Breach: A New Perspective” from security provider, Black Kite, curated with Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) that examined the financial impact of 2,400 cyber incidents between 2017-2022.
“Few businesses understand the true cost of a single data breach. Aside from reputational damage and irreparable disruption to business operations, the financial impact can be lethal,” said Bob Maley, CSO of Black Kite. “Our latest research shows the devastating impact of cybercrime on today’s most resilient organizations, and our mission is to educate leaders on the importance of third-party risk intelligence in order to win against the bad guys.”
Fourteen Black Kite researchers examined the cost and impact per industry and root causes of data breaches (including the top threat actors), as well as the cybersecurity posture and ransomware susceptibility of organizations.
Breaking Down Costs
Key findings include:
- Overall average cost of a data breach (outliers removed) – $15.01 million
- Overall average cost of a data breach (including outliers) – $75.21 million
- Most financially devastating threat actor: Conti, with ten attacks averaging at $84.98 million per incident
700 of the companies breached within the last five years – or one-third – no longer have a digital presence or never disclosed their company name - 79 percent of the 1,700 analyzed breached companies are highly susceptible to a phishing attempt
- Finance and Insurance had the highest number of incidents (445), with an average cost of $35.34 million per incident
The global cost of cybercrime is expected to hit $10 trillion in the next three years – up $7 trillion from 2015 – yet many businesses aren’t aware of the true cost and risk.
“As successful breaches continue to pile up and the cost of a breach continues to escalate, too many vendors are claiming to have the silver bullet to solve the challenges that security operations teams face, while really providing a cobbled together set of capabilities like a house of cards,” said Sanjay Raja, vice president of product at security provider, Gurucul. “We have seen the direct result of more advanced and costly attack campaigns combined with unadaptable and insufficient SIEM and XDR solutions leading to security struggling to detect, investigate and respond to attacks from just 2 to 3 months extended to 7 to 9 months in recent years. Tacking on analytics or functional pieces is not the solution. Organizations need an integrated approach that not only detects an attack, but also helps security teams prioritize and validate the full attack campaign early in the kill chain.
“As always, the best defense is an effective offense to protect against data breaches. Organizations need newer and more advanced technologies beyond current XDR and SIEM platforms,” Raja said.
Breaches Hurt Everyone
These issues affect more than just the large organizations, it also has the potential to hurt the smaller players.
“Small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly susceptible, and very financially exposed, to threats today,” said Kevin Novak, managing director at security provider, Breakwater Solutions. “To compete, they are being forced to deliver technological capabilities that rival their larger competitors, but they simply don’t have the benefits of scale that those larger companies have to support that technology. In fact, we often see SMBs without any formalization of cybersecurity within the enterprise but maintain a significant online presence.
“Often, when thinking about cybersecurity, an enterprise will consider things like data being leaked, or bank accounts being compromised. Their decision making around these threats leads to only partially informal decisions about loss appetite. They fail, unfortunately, to consider many of the other aspects of cyber risk including cyber events that, for instance, create operational downtime or a complete unrecoverable loss of company data,” Novak said.
Click here to view the entire report.