According to the new report from IBM, the average cost of data leakage in 2023 has increased to $4.45 million per incident. This is a 2.3% increase compared to 2022 ($4.35 million) and a 15.3% increase compared to 2020 ($3.86 million). The most common type of data leakage was personal information of customers and employees, accounting for 52% of all incidents.
The report indicates that one-third of companies discovered the data leak on their own, while the rest were informed by third parties or attackers. The costs associated with detecting and evaluating the leakage increased by 9.7% to $1.58 million, while the cost of loss of business decreased by 8.5% to $1.30 million. In the United States, the average cost of data leakage was the highest globally, reaching $9.48 million.
The report highlights that 82% of the leaks involved data stored in publicly available, private, or combined clouds. Additionally, 39% of the leakage incidents affected multiple cloud platforms, resulting in fines exceeding the average amount of $4.75 million.
IBM provided several recommendations for managers to prevent data leaks. These include ensuring safety measures at all stages of development, monitoring hybrid cloud platforms, incorporating AI and automation, and implementing incident response systems.
Companies that actively utilize AI and automation for security measures experienced an average loss of $1.76 million due to data leakage. Furthermore, these companies were able to reduce the time for identifying and localizing the leak by 108 days.
The report, conducted in partnership with the Ponemon Institute, collected data from 553 organizations in 16 countries and 17 industries. Each of the companies encountered data leaks between March 2022 and March 2023.