The Cost of a Breach [2022]
Data breaches are costly. With time, their cost is rapidly increasing. According to the 2021 Cybersecurity Ventures report, the breach cost has risen to 10% year-over-year after 2017. If you look at the world statistics on online crime, you will find that the yearly cost of these breaches will exceed the 10 trillion USD marker, whereas, in 2015, it was down to 3 trillion USD.
The Rising Cost of a Breach
Ponemon Institute released a report on the Cost of a Data Breach, revealing that the average cost of a breach, according to worldwide breach statistics in 2020, was 3.86 million USD.
In 2019, this figure was 3.93 million USD. If you narrow down the trends to the USA only, there was a 5.49% increase in breaches in 2020 compared to 2019. In fact, in 2020, the average cost in the USA was 8.46 million USD.
According to IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the two driving factors in the increase of cost are:
- Underrepresentation or absence of incident response protocols.
- Underrepresentation or absence of security automation.
The Average Lifecycle of a Breach
According to 2019 stats, the average time it took to identify a breach was 206 days. It took 73 days to control the breach, making an average lifecycle of 279 days.
However, in 2020, the average time to identify the breach rose to 212 days, while it took 75 days to contain it. As a result, the lifecycle rose to 287 days.
In 2022, the average time to identify and contain a breach decreased to 277, which is less but still more than the average of 257 days reported in 2017. Remember that the faster a business identifies and contains a breach, the lower the damaging costs will be.
If you look at data breaches with a lifecycle of less than 200 days, their average cost will be almost 3.74 million USD in 2022. However, if the number of days exceeds the 200-day mark, the average breach costs almost 4.87 million USD.